


In Your Head

by sara_holmes



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Brain Damage, Comic Book Science, Hospitals, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Procedures, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Sharing a Brain, Steve Rogers Feels, Timeline What Timeline, author shows blatant disregard for canon continuity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-05-24 11:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 47,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14953985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sara_holmes/pseuds/sara_holmes
Summary: Getting Bucky back is possibly the best thing to happen to Steve ever. Even if Bucky is not exactly the fella he used to be, keeping him close is definitely #1 on Steve's to-do list. That being said, ending up with Bucky's consciousness riding shotgun in his brain is probably too close for even Steve.Thanks a bunch, Deadpool.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired by (shamelessly ripped off from) that time in comics where Deadpool ended up with the consciousness of a SHIELD agent in his brain. Enjoy.

Steve Rogers is on the subway when the call comes in. He’s riding the F train through Brooklyn, sitting in a corner with his shoulders hunched up near his ears, tapping through Youtube on his phone. He likes the subway. For as different as it is now, it still sounds the same, the rumbling clatter of metal on metal, the smothered hiss of the air in the tunnels and the whine of the engines. If he doesn’t look up - or pay attention to the fact he’s got a supercomputer in the palm of his hand - then he can almost kid himself that he’s back.

It near enough smells the same too, which he’s not sure whether to file under ‘blessing’ or ‘extremely ripe curse.’

He remembers it clear as day. Cramming onto the packed Q, heading towards Coney Island. Bucky was tall enough to reach the straps so Steve’d just stand close and hold onto Bucky’s jacket, jammed in under his arm. He used to get spitting mad about it, but after a couple of years of Bucky slinging his arm over Steve’s shoulders, he kind of resigned himself to the fact that he was destined to be wedged under Bucky’s armpit in some way, shape or form.

Okay. No thinking about Bucky on the subway. Actually, no thinking about Bucky _period_ , because then he remembers that Bucky actually grew up to be the Winter Soldier and Steve hasn't seen the Winter Soldier since the Unfortunate Blowing Up of SHIELD incident, and Steve now has _no idea where he is._

Irony is truly a tricky bitch. Maybe if he’d not discovered that SHIELD was actually Hydra and hadn’t blown them up, they could help him find Bucky.

(Sam tells him that dwelling on Bucky and moping around isn’t going to do anyone any good. The guy’s the Winter Soldier, he won’t be found unless he wants to be found. Steve says he’s not moping, he just rides the subway and tries not to cry about his missing best friend in a completely normal, non-mopey way, thanks.)

He’s trying to not think about it by watching a video of a kitten riding around on a robot vacuum. Until the supercomputer in his palm starting vibrating against his fingertips, a picture of Tony goddamn Stark covering up half the screen. Damn. Now he’s missed the bit where the cat tips off the robot vacuum and that's the whole reason he’s watching the video in the first place.

He closes his eyes tight for a moment. Takes a breath. Answers the phone.

“Tony.”

“Cap, oh my Cap, wow, that doesn’t work as well with one syllable, but calling you Captain might give you illusions that I actually respect your rank and title-”

“What do you want.”

“Hydra are planning a tea party for you this evening,” Tony says, sounding supremely unconcerned. “But instead of tea, they’re bringing ray-guns and tanks. You wanna come in?”

Steve has to have another moment of closing his eyes. Well, it’s not like he had anything else on his schedule today. Since he blew up SHIELD and dismantled the country’s leading security apparatus, he’s kind of...in a lull.

(Sam says he’s unemployed and would do better to _accept_ the fact. Steve says he’s not been unemployed since nineteen thirty-eight and he’s not about to start now.)

“Come in to the Tower? Surely if I’m expecting to be shot at by lasers and tanks I should head away from the civilian population? I don’t want people trying to kill me to ruin anyone else's day.”

Across the car, a woman’s eyes go wide. Steve nods at her, goes back to his call.

“Well they're not trying to kill you, they're apparently trying to kidnap you. And we’ve actually got the jump on them for once,” Tony says. There’s a pause. “So you maybe come in and we can come up with a plan or something? Or whatever, I know you like to plan, we can write it down and laminate it or whatever.”

Oh christ. There’s only one thing worse than Tony Stark running his mouth and that’s when Tony Stark is awkwardly trying to cover up genuine concern. Steve sighs. He seems to do that a lot with Tony. And Clint. And Natasha too, come to think of it.

(Sam says he needs better friends. Steve asks what that means for Sam seeing as he’s his friend too. Sam tells him he’s the exception to the rule. It’s everyone else who is clearly the problem.)

“Alright, I’ll come in if you can guarantee no-one is going to blow me up while I’m in the middle of New York.”

“Sure thing. Pinky swear. Cross my heart. Come on. Get your patriotic ass off at the next stop and you can catch the B back to us. Or you can run, whatever.”

Steve frowns. He’s pretty sure his face is doing that thing that Clint calls ‘kermit-face.’ “How do you know where I am?”

Too late. Tony has already hung up.

Steve wants to curse at the phone but he’s mindful that a) he’s Captain America and b) there’s a lady sitting right opposite him. Though said lady might be offended that he didn’t curse in front of her, just because she’s a lady. The future is tricky sometimes.

The train rattles to a stop and he gets up. The lady is now very, very pale and eyeing him like _he’s_ about to explode. He nods at her with a polite ‘ma’am,’ before hopping off and deciding that a cab might actually be his best option. He tends to cause panic when he runs through the middle of Manhattan in civvies and he should really rush seeing as there’s an imminent Hydra attack.

Besides, he’s done enough moping about on the subway for one day.

 

* * *

  

When he gets back, there's a holographic map shining above the meeting room table and everyone is being loud. Tony has his phone in one hand, a glass of scotch in the other and is yammering away at Rhodey who is half-listening, half-watching the map with a speculative look on his face. Clint is firing arrows into the dartboard that shouldn’t really be in the meeting room, but Clint says he thinks best when he’s shooting and arguing with Clint is like...well. Steve suspects it might be a lot like arguing with _him_. Natasha is tapping away on a laptop, eyes narrowed. Sam is arguing with her, leaning over her shoulder in a way that would normally land a guy with a broken arm or neck. Bruce is hovering, listening to bits of conversations and fiddling with his glasses.

“Cap!” Clint shouts, going to yank his arrows out of the dartboard, though honestly at this point they’re probably well through the dartboard and into the wall. “You made it!”

“Anyone want to tell me what’s going on?” Steve asks. His shield is sitting in the chair at the head of the table and he feels a stab of irritation. People need to stop touching his stuff, especially when he last remembered his stuff was locked in his room.

(Sam says if he hates it so much he should move out. Steve says he can't move out, he’s too poor to live in his old neighborhood in Brooklyn anymore, and ain’t that a kicker. Sam says he should live somewhere else then. Steve ignores this because come on, Sam. He’s not just going to betray the neighborhood like that.)

“Hydra are coming to kidnap you!” Clint says. “Happy Tuesday!”

Steve goes and moves his shield out of the chair, sits down. “Is there even enough of an organised cell left to try and kidnap me?” he says. “I thought they were scratching in the dust after we took down SHIELD.”

“We thought so,” Natasha says. Sam drops into the chair next to her, looks over at Steve.

“Have you been riding the subway all morning?”

Now Steve’s ma didn’t raise him a liar, but she did raise him to stand up for himself, which is why he just meets Sam’s suspicious gaze head-on and says, “Yeah, what of it?”

Sam holds his hands up. Surrender. “Whoa, Captain Cranky, just asking.”

“Hydra are planning to kidnap me, I’m allowed to be cranky.”

Tony sits down in the chair next to Steve. “Stale cinnamon roll, been in this world too long, too cynical.”

Steve has no idea what he is talking about but Clint cackles with laughter and even Rhodey hides a smile. He must look suitably unimpressed because everyone - even Tony - stops assing around and convenes around the table.

“Nat,” Steve says, because he’s in charge and no-one else seems willing to be. “What have we got?”

“Mid-strength Hydra cell active just outside of Columbus, Ohio,” she says. “Surveillance from Coulson’s team picked them up. They’re planning a pretty hefty assault on the Tower with the aim of taking Captain America as a hostage.”

Steve rests his elbow on the edge of the table, propping his chin in his hand. He suddenly feels very tired. “So...they’re planning to attack the tower and so you brought me back...to the tower.”

“We’ve got like, six hours before they show up,” Tony says. “I told you, we wanted to plan.”

Rhodey leans back, looks at Tony. “ _You_ wanted to plan?”

“I can plan, don’t look at me like that, I am a team player Rhodes, how dare you.”

“So if we can get back to the point that Hydra are after me,” Steve interrupts before the bickering can get out of hand. “I gotta get out of the city. Away from civilians. We could do something high-profile, have it out there so word gets back to them that I’m leaving the city.”

“Treasure hunting in the Arizona desert? Sponsored swim across lake Michigan?” Clint suggests. “Visiting family across the river? That way we save New York _and_ wipe out a chunk of New Jersey.” Clint grins at Steve as he says it and it reminds Steve so painfully of Bucky that it actually hurts.

“Or…” Steve says, rethinking. “We go to them. How outside of Columbus are we talking, Nat?”

“An old airfield,” she says. “So we’ve got more space to play around with there than we would here. There’s a couple of towns nearby that might be within collateral range.”

“We could evacuate a couple of towns,” Rhodey says. “I agree with Cap, let’s go get them before they get here.”

Sam raises a hand. “So, we’re agreeing that the plan to keep Steve safe from the guys trying to kidnap him...is to take him to the guys that are trying to kidnap him?”

“Best defense is a good offense,” Natasha says absently.

“Seconded,” Clint says, though Clint would probably agree with Natasha if she said the plan was to drop Steve off a cliff. Steve has recently learned the phrase _‘bros before hos’_ and while he’s never _ever_ going to utter it out loud himself - because it’s offensive and simplistic and demeaning and Natasha would murder him in his sleep - he thinks Clint could maybe be inspired by the phrase and maybe not base all of his decisions on whether Nat will like him for it or not.

“Alright, suit up,” Steve says. “Clint I want you piloting. Iron Man and War Machine, do _not_ overtake and start a fight before backup gets there.”

“Would we ever,” Tony says dismissively. “Alright. Are we doing hands in? Three, two, one, kick Hydra’s ass? Nope? Okay, I’m trying really hard to be a team player here guys.”

Steve picks up his shield and goes to find his suit. The others file out after him, leaving Tony talking about being a team player to precisely no-one.

 

* * *

 

 

Hydra do not seem to expect that they are coming. They get around two minutes out before alarms start pinging all over the quinjets systems, and Iron Man and War Machine swoop in to engage ground troops.

The intel was good. There are laser guns. There are tanks. They are organised.

And then, twenty minutes in, Steve is busy cleaving his way through Hydra troops who are packed into an aircraft hangar in a frankly embarrassingly compact deployment, and then three planes full of reinforcements land. Black suited soldiers pour out, chanting ‘ _hail Hydra, hail Hydra._ ’ Not the most imaginative of chants, but Steve can respect an appreciation for the basics.

“Oh, shit,” says Tony.

“Mother _fucker_ ,” says Clint.

“Cap, this is bad,” says Natasha.

“Where did these guys come from?” says Sam.

“Oh, alright,” says Bruce, and climbs off the quinjet and morphs into the Hulk.

With the Hulk as backup, the odds edge slightly back into their favour. It’s still a shitshow and Steve is mentally cursing Hydra, SHIELD and bad intel as he tries to clear the rest of the hangar. He hurls his shield at an oncoming tank, curses out loud as it ricochets off without doing any damage. He lunges to catch it, rolling and kicking out the legs of a Hydra grunt too stupid to get out of his way. He manages to leap up onto the top of the tank, trying to prise open the hatch so he can get in and take out the driver. It’s an old Commandos move - one opens the hatch, another drops a grenade, everyone runs like hell - but right now he’s on his own so he’s going to have to improvise-

There’s a very loud click and he feels something pressed to the back of his head. He freezes, holds his hands out.

“Up you yet, Cap,” says the Hydra goon, in the thickest Louisiana drawl that Steve has ever heard. It throws him off for a moment, because he was honestly expecting German. “Slow and easy does it boy, up you get.”

There’s a _crack_ and Steve jerks, wildly thinking he’s been shot, and then the goon falls backwards with a bullethole between his eyes. _Nat,_ Steve thinks, and then there’s a hefty thud as someone decidedly heavier and more male lands next to Steve in heavy combat boots.

Steve looks up and nearly throws up.

_“Bucky?”_

Bucky is in his Winter Soldier gear but sans mask, looking at Steve like he’s very, very afraid of him. He nods jerkily, then kneels down and uses his metal arm to yank open the hatch of the tank. With his other hand, he holds out a grenade. Steve takes it, pops the pin, drops it in the hatch. Bucky slams the lid shut and they both promptly run like hell. They’re still running when the tank explodes, showering the airfield in pieces of shrapnel, like burning metallic rain.

Steve lifts his shield up over their heads, an automatic response. “What are you _doing_ here?” he says to Bucky. Pieces of metal plink off the surface of the shield.

“I,” Bucky says. “Hydra. I found out they. You. They were here to k-k-kill you. I. I didn’t want that.”

Steve is pretty sure that that’s the best sentence he’s ever heard in his life. He stares at Bucky, wondering what the hell he should do. Hug him? Punch him in the face for leaving Steve alone after they blew up SHIELD?

And then Tony says, “Okay either the Winter Soldier just turned up or I'm hallucinating leather-clad assassins again,” and of course the entire team starts to panic. Jesus, Bucky puts a bullet in him one time while he’s being mind-controlled and suddenly everyone thinks Steve shouldn’t trust him.

“I’m,” Bucky says. He’s still standing very close, like he and Steve are sheltering from the rain under an umbrella together. He still looks very scared, too. “I’m here to help.” As he says it, he reaches down to pull a gun from a holster on his thigh. He sticks his hand between Steve’s shield-bearing arm and his head, crowding close so he can shoot a Hydra goon without the gun going off right next to Steve’s ear.

He edges back out of Steve’s personal space, looking a little defiant. Steve nods jerkily and resists the urge to pull Bucky back in. He reaches up to his comm unit. “He’s here to help.”

Several skeptical, indignant, disbelieving and downright rude noises come back at him.

“It’s the Winter Soldier!”

“He shot you!”

“He shot Nat!”

“Hydra’s best assassin!”

“He threw me off a bridge!”

“And he wrecked your car!”

“Steve, he tried to kill you!"

"Step away from the assassin!”

Steve winces. “Okay, not the best track record, but right now he’s of sane mind and he wants to help.”

Still, he gets the disbelieving noises. Bucky turns and shoots another Hydra goon, grabbing Steve and spinning them so that Steve drops the shield just in time to block a round from a laser. Great, that’ll have stripped the paint right off.

Tony's incredulous voice comes over the comm. “Is he trying to _strangle_ you right now?”

“No, he’s shooting Hydra soldiers and helping me block,” Steve hisses. Oh christ, Bucky’s got his real arm over over his shoulders, just like he used to. Steve’s crammed in at his side, can feel the warmth of Bucky’s breath on the exposed parts of his face, that’s how close they are. “I am trusting him, and if any one of you bastards takes this as an opportunity to hurt him I will _end you._ ”

There’s a pause over the comms. In the distance, there’s the faint sound of the Hulk roaring and something exploding.

“Wow, tell us what you really think,” Clint says. “Alright, I’m heading to cover Cap and his boytoy.”

“I’m heading to the control tower, War Machine, back me up,” Nat says. “Oh and Steve, don't think you won’t pay for calling me a bastard.”

“Noted,” Steve says, pushing Bucky away slightly so he can sling his shield at a group of advancing soldiers. Bucky presses his back to Steve’s, twin Glocks already firing. Staccato music to Steve’s ears.

“So, you okay?” Steve yells, stretching up to catch the shield.

“Maybe we d-don’t talk about it right now?” Bucky shouts back. Steve laughs, harder than the joke probably warrants, but he’s bordering on hysterical here, he can probably be excused.

“Alright, later,” Steve shouts. “Which means you can’t run off again, right?”

“Sure,” Bucky says.

Steve’s about to call him out on it - _yeah see you said the word but you don’t sound sure, don’t give me that evasive tone, I will tie you down to keep you here if necessary_ \- but the roar of engines smothers the conversation. It’s a helicopter, a huge Black Hawk, circling low and whipping up a stinging barrage of dust and grit.

“More reinforcements?” Bucky asks.

“I don’t know!”

The Black Hawk makes like it’s going to land then swerves violently as an RPG is fired in a drunken arc towards it. A blade clips the control tower and it lurches violently to the side, before spinning in a couple of circles then hitting the floor in a screaming tangle of metal and glass.

“We’re on it!” Steve yells into his comm. “Engaging with the fallen chopper now, everyone else stick to your targets!”

He and Bucky take off at a run. Steve honestly feels like he could run around the globe, he’s so hopped up on adrenaline and Bucky’s presence. Actually, scrap running, he’s damn sure he could fly right about now.

“Shield,” Bucky says as they get closer. Steve crouches with the shield in front, Bucky standing behind him with his gun aimed at the wreckage. It’s groaning and spitting out feeble sparks from somewhere, but otherwise seems still.

“Movement,” Bucky says curtly. “Left rear.”

Steve nods, going tense. Bucky crowds closer. His knees bump against Steve’s back.

Then a white flag appears from the shattered cockpit window.

“What the fuck,” Bucky says.

“Don’t shoot!” a voice shouts. “I’m here for a plot-twist!”

Steve stays perfectly still as a figure moves in the wreckage. The flag vanishes and a man crawls out of the gap where the window was, a man wearing a red and black suit made out of a material that looks similar to Steve’s own, apart from the suit covers his whole head too. He’s got a gun in a holster on his thigh and a pair of swords strapped to his back. Steve has no idea what is happening and it is making him very nervous and very angry.

“Stay where you are,” he snaps. “Or you’ll be shot.”

The man slithers out of the wreckage onto the floor. He holds up his hands, staggering up onto his knees. “I’m a good guy right now,” he protests. “Oh wow, you’re even more handsome in person.”

Bucky makes a funny noise. It might have once upon a time been a laugh.

“What are you doing here?” Steve asks.

“I told you,” the figure says. “Okay, I’m a superhero. I used to belong to a separate franchise but then there was this thing with the studios...never mind. Hydra are the bad guys, I’m here to help. Big fan of yours by the way, Cap.”

“Who _are_ you?” Bucky asks, sounding bewildered. Good. It’s not just Steve then.

“The name’s Pool, Deadpool,” says the figure. “I’m a kind of not very super hero? I have healing powers and I’m really good at killing things.”

Steve is honestly not sure if he can handle any more today. Between Hydra, Bucky and now this guy, he’s all out of shock. So he just decides to roll with it. “Be my guest,” he says, and gestures to the airport slash battlefield. “Team, we’ve got...uh, another guest,” he says. “Says his name is Deadpool and that he’s got healing powers.”

“What even is today?” Clint replies, sounding breathless. “Alright, we could use all the help we can get.”

“Excuse me,” Rhodey says. “Are we just trusting every crazy person who turns up out of the blue?”

“Apparently so,” Tony replies. “Less bitching, more shooting. Let’s wrap this up!”

And so they do. With Bucky and Steve acting as a terrifyingly efficient duo and Deadpool messily killing his way through everything that gets too close, they soon get the upper hand. Hulk takes care of the last tank, and Sam and Natasha manage to get the villain du jour in cuffs before he can run away or chomp down on any cyanide.

Steve goes to talk to him. Bucky follows right on his tail and honestly, Steve feels better about that than he does about winning the battle. Deadpool seems more interested in following Clint about now that the fight is over, but Steve has bigger problems than the increasingly unnerved look on Clint’s face.

“Here you go, Cap,” Natasha says, pushing the guy to his knees on the pitted asphalt of the runway. “One head of Hydra.”

“Cut off one head-” the man begins, then stops as Bucky draws his gun and points it right at his face. He doesn’t look scared enough though, considering who Bucky is and what he’s capable of. “I will talk,” the man says smoothly. He’s even wearing a monocle for chrissakes, it’s like he's following the dress code for eccentric super-villains. “Captain, I would like to speak to you about my official surrender.”

Steve narrows his eyes at him. Surrender is not usually Hydra’s game. “What about it?” Steve asks. “No offense but you don’t seem to be in a position for bargaining.”

“If you let me live, I will give you the location of various Hydra nests across the globe.”

Bucky takes a step back. He reaches for Steve’s elbow, fingertips just brushing the reinforced kevlar before Bucky seems to remember himself, withdrawing his hand. “Don’t trust him. Steve. This d-doesn't. Doesn't feel right.”

“There is a computer, in the control tower,” the man says to Steve, eyes locked on his face. “It has files. They will help. They are coded.”

“And I don’t suppose you would trade the passwords for something. Say, your life?”

“I will,” the man says. “The codes are, желание, ржaвый, cемнадцать, pассвет-”

Bucky makes a sound. A confused, wounded noise. The gun drops from his hand and he reaches up to press his fingers to his temple.

“Wait," Steve says, alarmed. His attention is on Bucky and how pale he’s suddenly gone.

The man does not wait. He raises his voice, shouting more words in Russian.

“Печь, Девять, добросердечный-”

Bucky’s knees give out. Steve tries to grab him and keep him upright. Natasha lunges at the man, tries to put her hand over his mouth but he drops down out of her grip quick enough to shout “возвращение на родину, oдин, грузовой вагон!”

Bucky’s eyes roll back and then snap open, and Steve thinks ‘oh shit,’ a moment before a metal fist comes flying right at his face.

 

* * *

  

Clint is busy trying to back away from Deadpool’s requests for him to autograph increasingly more intimate body parts when he senses that _shit has just gone down_. He looks around in time to see Steve hit the floor like he’s had all his strings cut, flying backwards and hitting the runway hard on his shoulders, head snapping back with the force of it. The Winter Soldier goes after him, grabbing his shoulder straps and following him down with another punch from the metal fist.

“Whoa, mayday, mayday!” Clint shouts, starting to run towards Cap. “Everyone, Winter Soldier is trying to kill Cap again!”

“Again?”

“What?!”

“I _hate_ being right.”

“I thought Cap said he was helping?!”

“Someone shoot him!”

Clint grabs an arrow, aims it right at the Soldier. He’s so busy trying to beat the shit out of Cap that he doesn’t see it coming; it sticks him right in the ribs. He jerks back, looking down at the arrow that’s embedded in his side, then just turns back to Cap like he’s brushed off a bug bite.

“No, he’s been triggered!” Natasha is shouting. “Codewords, he’s not himself!”

“I don’t care who he is, he’s hurting Steve!” Tony bellows, and then appears in a blaze of red and gold, hitting the Soldier like a train. He goes flying and Tony hits the ground between him and Cap, churning up the asphalt beneath his feet.

“Tony Stark has a heart,” Clint pants, drawing another arrow. “What do I do?! Steve said not to hurt him!”

“Hurt him, hurt him with extreme prejudice!” Sam shouts. “Haven't you got any tranquilisers in that quiver?!”

Oh god, he does. He’s an idiot. He reaches for the tranquiliser tips, quickly praying to anyone that’s listening that Nat hasn’t noticed him being such an idiot, that would be great.

The Soldier is back on his feet, grabbing a knife from somewhere within his black leather getup, stalking towards Cap like he’s going to carve him up for Thanksgiving.

The second arrow hits right above the first. The soldier wheels around, eyes like steel, and hurls the knife at Clint. He has a second in which to think _‘oh god i’m gonna die, someone tell Nat I love her and someone feed the dog’_ but then a blur of red lunges in front of him and there’s a squishy thud as the knife hits Deadpool right in the stomach. He hits the ground and sprawls out on his back, coughing weakly. “Worth it,” he chokes. “Oh god. Someone tell Cap that I love him.”

Clint doesn’t stop. “Thanks!” he shouts, still running towards Cap. Eh, Deadpool’s got a healing factor that’s better than Steve’s, he’ll be fine.

“Clint!” Natasha says from where she’s now somehow atop the Soldier’s shoulders like she’s riding a mechanical bull, a garrote around his neck. Unfortunately he’s got his metal hand between his throat and the wire, so her attempts to strangle/behead him are somewhat hindered. “Hit him with another one!”

He’s not fast enough. The Soldier literally throws Nat from his shoulders and turns back to finish murdering Steve - Steve who is now somehow on his feet and backing away swiftly, spitting out a mouthful of blood, raising his fists.

Okay, there’s a severe risk that someone is going to get murdered but Clint can spare a moment to recognise that he really, _really_ thinks that Cap is fucking awesome.

“And you fell for it!” the Hydra-boss-man cackles, which doesn’t really fit with the whole dignified villain shtick he was playing. “You came here to me, following a breadcrumb trail, just like the Winter Soldier did!”

“What the hell do you mean?” Sam asks, grabbing the guy's collar and shaking him.

“We played you,” boss-man says, full of triumph. “Drew you out here, let slip intel to the Winter Soldier that his beloved Captain would be here. And now, Captain America will be destroyed by his oldest friend. Simply _poetic._ ”

“Oh fuck Hydra poetry,” Clint says. “Cap isn’t going to let the Soldier kill anyone.”

Okay, he said it and he wishes he hadn’t because no sooner have the words left his mouth than the Soldier is pulling another gun from somewhere. He aims a shot at Steve, is blocked by the shield. Steve punches him right in the jaw but the Soldier retaliates with an uppercut that Steve barely dodges. He’s pulling his punches, and it’s so obvious to see that he’s doing his damnest not to hurt the Soldier, even as the Soldier is pretty much trying to rearrange his face. And his limbs. And his internal organs.

“Hawkeye, shoot him again!”

He does as he’s told and sticks the Soldier with another tranquilliser arrow. This one seems to do the trick. He staggers and then sinks to the floor, just in time for Iron Man to punch him square in the face, knocking him the fuck out.

Steve staggers backwards and falls onto his ass, clearly hurting. He takes a few deep breaths and then pushes himself up, crawling over to the Soldier’s prone form. “Bucky,” he rasps, pushing the Soldier’s hair away from his face. “ _Bucky._ ”

“Steve,” Tony says, trying to pull him back away from the mind-controlled maniac. Steve shoves him away, leaning forwards to check the Soldier’s pulse. His eyes are too bright and holy shit, is Cap going to cry?

“I’m taking him back to Tower,” Steve says, voice too thick. He swallows hard, throat bobbing. His hand settles on the Soldier's chest, right above where his heart would be, if he had one.

Tony raises his hand. “Uh, he just tried to kill you.”

“It wasn't his fault,” Steve says. “Oh god, Hydra have _fucked him up._ ”

His voice breaks and Clint isn’t sure if it’s that or the f-bomb that’s more shocking to hear. Either way, no-one argues. Tony is nodding. Sam is coming around to help. Nat is gently touching Steve’s shoulder in one of her wordless gestures of support. When Clint sees that, he realises that yep, they’re definitely taking the Winter Soldier home with them.

The bad guy is hustled away. The Winter Soldier is divested of his weapons - and the arrows that are sticking out of him - and has his arms restrained but that’s all Steve allows before he’s picking him up and carrying him back to the jet, bridal style.

“He’s so lucky,” Deadpool whispers from behind Clint, making him jump. “Will you carry me?”

“No,” Clint says, and sets off after Cap and the others. “Hard pass.”

 

* * *

 

Steve takes Bucky to medical, because that’s what his gut tells him to do. His friends probably want him to take him to jail or something, but that’s not happening. Mostly because Steve knows that Bucky could break out of most jails and vanish into the wilderness and Steve is _not_ losing him again. He settles Bucky in one of the beds, though does keep his arms cuffed. If Bucky wakes up and is still trying to kill him...well. He’ll deal with it. The in-house doctors flutter around like anxious moths, and all seem pretty relieved when Steve tells them their services won’t be needed right at this moment.

He’s not sure he can take much more today. From lonely to grouchy to shocked to absolutely heartbroken, all in the space of six hours. Is emotional whiplash something you can get? If it is, Steve’s pretty sure he’s got it. His head hurts. Though that could be from being punched in the kisser by a super-soldier with a bionic arm.

Filled with restless energy, he first attends to his own wounds, slapping some steri-strips across the cut on the bridge of his nose and stitching up the cut in his lip. Bucky would give him shit for doing it himself, but Bucky’s KO and besides, Bucky’s possibly not really Bucky anymore. Steve doesn’t know how _this_ Bucky will react. That train of thought sucks, so he ignores it and cleans Bucky up instead. He checks the arrow wounds, fixes up the gash in his cheekbone from where Iron Man punched him. He cleans the grit and blood from his skin and brushes his hair back.

He looks so different, yet somehow exactly the same.

“Was riding the F this morning,” he says to Bucky. “Thinking about me and you.”

(Sam would probably tell him that now is probably not the best time for him to start talking about feelings, seeing as the man he’s speaking to is more assassin than pal right now. Whatever. He’s not going to go to therapy, so Sam can take it or leave it.)

A while later, Clint comes in and stands behind him. He’s still suited up and most definitely hasn't showered. He’s got a mug of coffee in one hand and an arrow in the other. “The others have told me to stay here,” he says. “And if he wakes up and tries to kill you, I’ve got to stick him with this.”

Steve reaches for the arrow. “I’ll take it.”

“Nuh-uh,” Clint says, sliding out of reach. “You won’t do it. You’ll try and reason with him or something noble.”

Steve thinks about sticking Clint with the damn arrow. “If he’s trying to hurt me I won't hesitate to knock him out again,” he says. “He’ll understand.”

Clint narrows his eyes. “I don’t believe you.”

“Then don’t,” Steve says. He knows the others don’t get it. He knows they don’t understand. If they did, he wouldn’t be riding the subway every other day, alone and trying to kid himself that he's still got something from the past to hold onto.

Bucky’ll understand. Steve knows he will.

Luckily, he doesn’t have to wait any longer to test out Clint’s belief in him or not. Bucky stirs. His brow creases, and he tries to lift his arms. He opens his eyes, looking woozy.

“Steve?”

“Who am I dealing with here?” Steve asks. He throws a hand back to press against Clint’s chest, not wanting Clint to re-tranquilise Bucky until absolutely necessary. “Buck,” he repeats, urgent. “Buck, is that you?”

Bucky starts to cry. His whole face just crumples and he lifts his arms to try and hide his face. His shoulders shake with the force of it.

Steve wants to cry himself. “Buck,” he breathes, and sits on the edge of the bed. He pulls Bucky forwards so he can hide his face in Steve’s shoulder. He can feel the metal of the arm-cuffs digging into his stomach but he doesn’t care. Just puts a hand on the back of Bucky’s neck and wraps the other arm around his shoulders.

“I - I hurt you. Again,” Bucky tries to say.

“Yeah, lucky for me you punch like someone’s grandma,” Steve says. “I only needed eight stitches this time, were you even trying?”

Bucky cries harder. Maybe Steve needs to ease him back in with the jokes. He's been told his sense of humour takes some getting used to, though he honestly thought that was just because everyone expected him to like wholesome, family-friendly fun and knock knock jokes.

Frankly, they can prise his sarcasm, sass and self-deprecation from his cold, dead hands.

“Okay, so he’s back to normal,” Clint says, relieved. He puts the arrow away in his quiver, takes a big gulp of his coffee. He looks at where Steve’s hand is stroking over the back of Bucky’s neck, then looks at the ceiling. “So I’m going to go? Tell the others? Yeah, this isn’t awkward at all, I’ll just.”

He flees. Steve shakes his head, watching him go. God, what is it with modern men and their aversion to feelings? Toxic masculinity is going to be the death of them all, he’d bet his last dime on it.

Steve leans back, wipes Bucky’s face with his thumbs. Bucky lets him do it. He even leans in to the touch a fraction, just enough for Steve to notice. Christ, he’s like some poor feral dog that’s been starved of touch for so long that it’s doesn’t know what to do when someone shows it kindness.

“I’m so sorry,” Bucky croaks. “I came b-b-because I thought it’d help. I gotta go, I gotta get away from you-”

Steve starts to feel like a candle that’s slowly burning out, his relief at having Bucky back guttering out into uncertainty and fear. “What?”

“I can't be around you,” Bucky says. Steve goes cold. “Those codes, they’re still there. Someone says them and. And I’ll-”

“Well right now it’s only me in here and I don’t know any Russian,” Steve says. “You’re staying. You got shot, and Iron Man hit you hard. You need to heal.”

“You’re not listening.”

“You know me,” Steve whispers, leaning in and knocking their foreheads together. “I never listen to you.”

And Bucky laughs. It’s a tiny little choked sob but it’s a laugh and so it counts. Steve’s heart swells, a strange bubble of feeling in his chest that’s making all his organs feel weird and displaced.

“Okay,” Bucky says, heaving out a sigh. “But you gotta p-p-p-promise.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Anything.”

“Then you - you gotta promise to kill me if I-”

“No,” Steve says immediately. “Offer redacted. No more promises for you. Jesus, Buck, what are you trying to do to me here? Are you nuts?”

He probably shouldn’t be angry right now. Though he’s not sure what acceptable emotions would be in this scenario. So. Angry it is.

“Steve,” Bucky says. He sounds tired.

“No, I’m not hearing it,” Steve snaps. “I just got you back, I am _not_ talking about this.”

“St-” Bucky begins and then stops like his tongue has gotten caught, stuck to the back of his teeth. He frowns. Moves his mouth like he’s trying to bite down on something. “Something isn’t right.”

“What?” Steve asks, his righteous anger suddenly knocked out of him. “Buck?”

“Something smells weird,” Bucky says, and then his eyes roll back and his whole body seizes. His arms jerk up and Steve has to throw himself backwards so he doesn’t get clocked in the face by the restraints.

“Bucky!” Steve yells, leaning over to slam the emergency call button by the bed. Bucky’s shaking, his whole body fitting and his spine arching, threatening to pitch him off of the bed-

The doctors swarm in. They surround the bed, their fear of the Winter Soldier clearly over-ridden by their desire to help someone clearly in need. They drop the bed so it’s flat. Lights are shone in Bucky’s eyes. Someone calls for drugs and equipment. Steve is unceremoniously pushed out of the room by a tiny nurse in yellow scrubs.

“You wait out here like everyone else,” she says with a pointed finger. Steve knows better than to try and push his luck with the nurses so he stands there staring through the glass window, mouth pressed together in a hard line. His hands are ontop of his head and his heart is thudding sickly like it’s murmuring all over again, a double beat out of time.

“If you die,” Steve says blankly, directing his words at Bucky even though he can't see him among the bustle. “I am going to kill you.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is still the most fun I think I’ve had writing since Time Travelling Hawkeye. Please indulge my writer ego and leave comments <3

Bucky is kept sedated for the next four days. The doctors don't fully know what's going on but they do work out that the seizure was some by-product of the Hydra conditioning. Apparently, his brain has been engineered to need certain follow-up procedures after trigger word use, and cognitive recalibration a la Iron Man is not on the approved list.

Upon hearing this, Steve has to be talked down from going to find the bastard that triggered Bucky. For some reason, no-one believes him when he says he’s just going to chat to the guy.

(Sam often says that he’s got anger management issues. Steve says it’s fine, he manages being super angry all the time pretty well, so it’s not an issue.)

Either way, he’s told to not leave the tower until he looks less homicidal. Captain America is meant to inspire confidence and make people feel safe or some shit. He’s not meant to scare the bejesus out of the general populace with his murderous stare.

So, he splits his time between sitting at Bucky’s side, napping fitfully and beating up punching bags in the tower gym. The team have precisely one meeting in which they all make awkward small talk before Tony elbows his way in and demands to know if they’re keeping the pet assassin or not. Steve says yes before anyone else can even think about saying anything else, and everyone does that thing where they look at each other like _‘whelp, here we go.’_

He tells them he will fight them if they do anything to endanger Bucky, or if they tell anyone about Bucky being here.

Tony raises a hand. “I already called Helen Cho.” 

There’s a brief moment of chaos in which Steve starts yelling and Tony starts yelling right back and everyone else weighs in. (Bruce and Rhodey weigh in verbally. Sam, Natasha and Clint seem to think that the argument might escalate beyond a polite exchange of words, so end up standing between Steve and Tony like an Avengers barricade.) Steve thinks he’s being entirely reasonable in objecting to Tony calling in some doctor he doesn’t even know, in inviting said doctor to mess around with Bucky’s brain. Tony thinks that Steve is being quote, an ungrateful shit, unquote. 

Sam backs Steve up because Sam is the best friend a man could ask for. Rhodey and Bruce both back Tony because of course they do, and to Steve’s utter shock and betrayal _Natasha_ sides with them too. She does have the decency to look bad about it, though she could be playing Steve for all he knows. He hopes she isn’t. He hopes they’re past that.

Then comes the end of days because Clint looks at Natasha, looks at Steve, then says, “I agree with Steve. Dick move, Stark.” 

Well, Steve thinks as he stands there with Sam trying to physically push him back – yeah, nice try, Sam, like that’s going to stop him if he actually wants to go anywhere – at least Clint disagreeing with Natasha is enough to distract them all from arguing.

He pushes Sam away from him and stalks away. He has half a mind to pick Bucky up and carry him out of the Tower, take him somewhere safe. However, when he gets there he simply sinks into his crappy plastic chair and stares at Bucky’s face, both wishing he would wake up and praying that he doesn’t, just to spare Bucky the pain of anything else that might come his way.

 

* * *

 

 

Bucky drifts on the edge of unconsciousness. Every now and again he feels himself edge towards wakefulness, murmured voices echoing indistinctly on his periphery. He does not chase them, because even drugged up to the gills he knows that waking from cryo is always the same: the people waiting for him are not friendly. 

Even though he swears that one of the voices sounds like Steve. 

He decides it can't possibly be, and sinks back into the darkness.

 

* * *

 

Steve finds that Helen Cho is absolutely wonderful and promptly hates himself for being such an ass about her. What makes it even worse is that Tony isn't even smug about it, he's just _nice_. By day four, Steve finds himself desperate for an eye roll or a thinly veiled insult, just for things to go back to normal. 

Clint has taken to following Steve around too, checking in at tellingly regular intervals. 

“No offence but you look sad as shit,” Clint says when Steve calls him out on it. He's eating cereal straight out of the box and looking at Steve like he's an idiot. “I'm keeping you company.” 

“I'd rather just be alone.” 

Clint simultaneously snorts and shoves another handful of Cheerios into his mouth. A few fall onto Steve's carpet. “Nah not happening,” he says. “I'm not going to start respecting your personal boundaries, I'm not Sam.”

Steve crosses his arms, feeling petty. “I'll bet Sam put you up to this.” 

Clint flicks a Cheerio at him. “I'll never tell,” he says. “Can you please just maybe dial down the Captain enough so I can be a bro. I'm trying here and you're making me feel bad.” 

Steve sighs. Clint holds out the box of cereal and Steve digs his hand in. 

“If it helps, I'm not going to make you talk about it,” Clint says. “I'm just going to feed you junk food and offer manly hugs.”

Well. Considering that talking about it makes Steve want to _die_ , he supposes he'll take it.

 

* * *

 

Helen Cho tells him she's never seen anything like it. She's standing by Bucky’s bed, caught between ‘apologetic human being’ and ‘super-intrigued doctor’. Clint is there too, supposedly for moral support, though he's currently occupied with looking at Bucky’s brain scans, squinting and tilting his head as if he'll understand them when they're blurry and sideways. 

Steve is staring at Bucky. He's a super soldier match for Steve yet he somehow looks so _small_.

“Captain Rogers?” 

“Yeah,” Steve says, blinking back into focus. That's right, conversation with doctor Cho. “Can you fix him?”

Helen looks uneasy. “I've never tried regeneration of brain tissue,” she says. “And even if we did regrow the damaged parts-” 

Steve is never going to get used to them talking about Bucky's goddamn _brain_ _damage_ , not ever. 

“-the issue of the trigger words is...it's a learned brain function, a pattern. We don't think the regeneration cradle would even identify it as something that needs to be fixed.”

Steve has no idea what to say. He feels pretty much like someone has scooped up his heart and soul and dumped them into a void.

Clint is now leaning so far sideways that he's in danger of tipping over. Goddamn acrobat. “Is it supposed to look so splotchy? It kinda looks like that cheese that I found in the back of the fridge. Or a cauliflower that Tom Brady has been using for practice.”

Helen’s brows shoot up. She opens her mouth but no words come out.

Steve knows exactly what that feels like.

 

* * *

 

He shakes Clint off his tail to go for a run. He does thirty-two miles then comes back for a shower which he doesn't cry in, his face was already wet so no-one can prove shit. Besides, it's the modern shampoo that's making his eyes all red, not the soul-crushing despair.

That's his story and he's sticking with it. 

That night, he sleeps sitting up in the plastic chair beside Bucky's bed. Sam appears to tell him he's being ridiculous, but Steve has become wise to his admittedly pretty good Cap-wrangling skills and derails him by simply agreeing with him. Wrong-footed by the lack of argument, Sam withdraws and sends in the big guns. 

Tony is much less easily dissuaded. Steve considers getting him to leave by making a well-aimed crack about his dad but he can't bring himself to do it; yeah Tony can be an asshole of the highest degree of annoyance but he's still Steve's friend.

Thirty minutes into the Starkaloguing (It's like a super villain monologue with more ego, more self-depreciation, considerably less evil intent. Steve’s gonna see who he needs to talk to about getting it added to the dictionary) and Steve opts for plan B: he simply picks Tony up and deposits him outside the room, shutting the door on Tony's “ _I'd like to see you try that when I'm in the suit!”_

Clint gets upgraded to new best friend because he doesn't even try and make Steve leave, just brings him a pizza and a bottle of coke and then leaves again.

Steve falls asleep with his arms folded on the side of Bucky's bed, head pillowed on his forearms. He wakes up an hour later because someone is standing _way too close to him._ Fight or flight kicks in, and honestly Steve was probably born without a flight reflex anyway, so he automatically jerks up and swings. His fist connects with a face and there's a shriek as a body goes flying across the medbay.

Heart pounding, Steve whirls around to fight, checking himself as he clocks a familiar red-suited figure staggering upright.

_“Deadpool?”_

Deadpool groans, clicking his nose back into place. “You punch like a truck.”

He's not alone. There's a guy behind him, cowering with his hands over his head. He’s wearing an old-issue black SHIELD uniform, the ones with the white banding. His hair and beard are definitely not regulation: both are longer and more wild than even Bucky’s. 

Steve stands between the intruders and Bucky's bed. Thinks about his shield which is being less than helpful all the way down in his room. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?” 

“Can't really be bothered to explain, consider it a plot hole,” Deadpool says. “God you're beautiful. How do you ever get anything done?” 

“Start talking,” Steve says dangerously. “Or I'm calling in an Assemble.” 

“Ohhhh, on one hand I really want to hear you say it, I'm pretty sure it'll make me tingly all over. But on the other hand, meet my friend. He's a necromancer slash wizard slash doctor slash genius.”

The man raises his hand. “I'm not actually a qualified-” 

Deadpool turns to slap a gloved hand over his mouth. “Quiet time,” he says, stroking his hand along the guy's face, patting his cheek before turning back to Steve. “Anyway, Cap, I know your pal is having some brain trouble and my pal here is, to misquote Hawkeye, great at brains.” 

Steve really thinks he should be calling for backup now. He knows crazy - he lives with several different brands of crazy - but this is a bit much, even for him.

And when crazy looks like it might be a danger to Bucky, Steve is going to react with extreme prejudice. 

“You take a step near him and I'll kill you.” 

Deadpool slaps a hand over his heart. “There needs to be more of this kind of love in the world,” he says. “And will you _please_ just calm your star spangled tits down, I'm here to help. Jeez, I'm just unappreciated in my time.”

He turns to his friend, gives him a thumbs up. The man lifts both his own hands, brow furrowed in concentration. Steve lunges across the room towards him but he barely gets a step before there's a blast of white light, and then nothingness.

 

* * *

 

Bucky opens his eyes. 

Everything is quiet and inexplicably, nothing hurts.

Above him is a brilliant blue-green ceiling, patterned with gold constellations and framed with intricate arches of stone. The floor beneath him is cool and hard. He looks left and right and realises exactly where he is. 

“What the fuck,” he mutters. The words are lost in the cavernous space, which is devoid of it's usual bustle and hum of life.

Grand Central Station.

There's no mistaking it. The ceiling, the massive windows, the huge concourse with the stairs and balcony level. The arches leading to the trains and subway. Even the gold clock, sitting silently above the information point. From where he's sitting, he can see a coffee shop and a newsagents, lights on but empty.

It's _all_ empty. There's not another soul in sight. Bucky sits up slowly. As he does he realises that he's not in his tactical gear but a white tee and soft grey sweatpants. No leather, no buckles and more distressingly _no weapons._  

Okay. Last he remembers he was...crying in Steve's arms. There was a plot. Hydra. They had told him - admittedly under torture, which he’s not proud of but needs must - that they were planning to kill the Captain. He'd gone to help and of course everything had fucked up in the most spectacular order. He'd attacked Steve, been knocked out by Iron Man, woken up in an actual real hospital where people were trying to look after him and then- 

Blank. He's used to blank but it's never been quite so annoying. There's stuff to do with Steve he's missing, he's sure of it.

He gets up. The floor is cold and smooth beneath his bare feet. He strains to hear but there's not a sound. Only his own breathing and the thud of his pulse.

On high alert, he goes searching. He checks the platforms, the maze of corridors and archways, even the service areas. By the time he returns to the main concourse he's concluded that he's definitely completely entirely alone. He tries getting out but none of the doors will open, not even with him unleashing full cybernetic arm strength on them.

He stands next to the clock at the information point and can only press his hands to his head and repeat his earlier sentiments.

“What the fuck.” 

No one answers.

Not at first, anyway.

 

* * *

 

When Steve comes to, he's in a hospital bed next to Bucky's. He jerks his head up off the pillow, trying to open his eyes. Trying being the operative word because it feels like there's an axe in his skull. He manages to crack an eye open and finds four very blurry and very concerned faces hovering in front of him.  

“Cap?” 

“He's awake!” 

“You okay, Steve?” 

“Oh thank god.”

The blurry faces become Sam, Clint, Tony and Bruce. They all look pretty worried. Steve tries to sit up but moving makes him want to puke so he lies back down, breathing shallowly to try and dispel the nausea.

“Buck,” he manages. 

“Safe and sound, sleeping in the next bed,” Tony tells him. “We locked Deadpool and company in the Hulk cage. Nat and Rhodey are on guard.”

Bruce screws up his face. “Cage? Really?” 

Tony rolls his eyes. “Okay he's staying in the Hulk’s private suite, that better?”

Bruce nods. “Much,” he says. “Steve, how are you feeling?”

“Like I got punched in the head by a train,” Steve says. “Can't this damn bed lift up?”

(Bucky used to say he was a terrible patient. He thinks that Sam will be saying the same thing in due course. He doesn't set out to be difficult, it just kind of happens. He doesn't like being helpless. Lying prone while four people lean over him and make concerned faces definitely makes him feel helpless.)

They oblige and lift half the bed up so he's sitting. He says “thanks” and then promptly throws up over the side of the bed, narrowly missing Clint’s feet. Sam pulls a face that probably translates as, “for god’s sake can't you just do as you are told for once in your life.”

“What happened?” he asks when he's regained the ability to speak without heaving. His head still hurts, though not enough to stop him noticing that his shield is no longer in his room but next to his bed, sitting on one of the shitty plastic medbay chairs.

He definitely needs new friends. Or better locks on his doors.

“No idea,” Tony says. “We're trying to get Deadpool to explain but he's not exactly coherent at the best of times, and I hit him pretty hard when I found him in here.”  

“Steve, the doctor wants to come and speak to you,” says Bruce.

“I think you should,” says Sam.

“Motion carried,” says Tony. 

“You definitely look like you're gonna throw up again,” says Clint. 

“What the fuck?” says Bucky. 

Steve jumps a mile and looks around so quickly that his neck clicks. The urge to be sick comes back with sour, stomach-churning vengeance but he swallows hard against it, reaching out to push Clint aside so he can see Bucky. 

“Bucky,” he calls, urgent. Even as the word leaves his mouth he registers that Bucky still appears to be KO, just as he has been for the past week. 

The others all turn to stare at Bucky, then look back at Steve.

“He's still there,” Sam reassures him.  

Steve stares at Bucky’s prone form. “He just said something,’’ he says. “I heard him.” 

The others all exchange glances. Bucky sleeps on.

Steve presses a hand to his head. Now the initial shock of pain is fading, he can tell that there's a strange pressure behind his eyes, like his brain is suddenly too big for his skull. He closes his eyes and tries to work out what the hell it is, when clear as day he hears it again.

“What the fuck.” 

He snaps his eyes open. Bucky is still unconscious. The others are still looking at Steve and haven't given any indication that Bucky has made a sound. 

Something has gone supremely fucking sideways here. 

He closes his eyes. Tries to concentrate on the strange pressure he can feel. Tentatively thinks ‘ _Bucky?’,_ the word a question inside his own head. 

“Steve?!”

It's Bucky’s voice, Steve would recognise it anywhere. The only catch is he seems to be hearing it _inside his fucking head_. 

“Steve where are you?! I can - I can hear you b-but I can't find you!” 

Steve opens his eyes again and stares at Bucky’s decidedly silent form. Scratch his earlier assessment. He wouldn't have ever guessed it to be possible, but it looks like supremely fucking sideways is apparently a massive understatement.

  



	3. Chapter 3

“Steve?”

 _‘Yeah I'm here,’_ he thinks back, feeling slightly hysterical.

“I'm in G-G-Grand Central _fucking_ Station,” comes the panicked reply.

“What?” Steve says aloud, and everyone in the room gives him another odd look. “Sorry,” he says. “My ears are ringing from that thing. Earlier. I'm not well. In fact I think I'm gonna be sleep. Sick. I'm going back to sleep.”

Tony is staring at him like he's grown an extra head. “Why is he babbling. What is happening. Is he concussed?”

“I'm fine,” Steve says at a volume that probably gives away just how not fine he is.

“Steve?! STEVE!” Bucky yells.

Steve concentrates so he can reply. It feels almost like focusing on the tickle of a sneeze before it crests into one.

_‘I'm here, calm down.’_

“You fuckin’ calm down, I'm s-stuck in Grand Central and there's no other fucker here except your fuckin’ voice!”

It sounds so much like Bucky that Steve feels like both laughing and weeping. He brings his knees up, folds his arms and buries his face in them.

“Okay,” he hears Sam say. “Give the man some privacy. Clear out.”

Okay, sorry Clint but Sam has just been elevated back into the position of number one best friend. While Sam is shooing the others out of the room, Steve turns his attention inward.

‘ _Bucky I think you're in my head.’_

“What?! How am - How am I in your head? And why d-d-does it look like Grand Central?!”

 _‘I don't know,’_ Steve thinks. ‘ _But I'm in the medbay and your body is sleeping next to me and there's something in my brain and I think it's you.’_

There's a long silence.

Then.

“What the actual fuck.”

Steve laughs, the sound strangled. _‘I'm going to go find some answers. I'll be back.’_

“Pal, if I'm in your head it sounds like - like I'm coming with you.”

There's not a lot Steve can say to that really. So he doesn't reply, just sits there with his head in his hands as he wonders what he must have done in a past life for _this_ to be his lot.

 

* * *

 

Steve waits until the others deem him fit enough to be left unattended in the medbay. They're clearly all suckers because Steve has no intention of staying put. He grabs his shield, quickly squeezes Bucky's hand and then leaves the room to go and get some answers.

He gets two corridors down and then Nat steps out of a doorway and scares the shit out of him. He refrains from braining her with the shield by only the barest of margins.

“Jesus, Nat, don't do that!”

“You are supposed to be in medical,” she says. “What, you refuse to leave Bucky's side for days and then suddenly you're sneaking away from him?”

“I'm not, I'm just going to talk to Deadpool,” Steve says, gesturing at nothing with his free hand. “I want answers. How he got in and why he got in.”

“I did ask him,” Natasha frowns. “He just kept talking about continuity errors. Like computer simulation stuff. Maybe he thinks he's in the Matrix.”

“Great,” Steve sighs. “Another whack-job trying to make my life harder.”

Natasha almost-smiles at him. “Luckily, most of the whack-jobs are your friends.” She links her arm through his. “I'll come with you.”

He huffs. “If you were my friends you'd stop breaking into my rooms,” he says but he allows her to turn him and then steer him along.

He gets his second (third? Fourth? By now he might as well stop counting) shock of the day when he turns up at the Heckle (HECL - Hulk Engagement and Containment Level) to find the cage empty.

He decides that quoting Bucky is probably appropriate. “What the fuck.”

Nat goes very still. “He was here. Jarvis, get me surveillance for the past-”

“I'm sorry, only Sir has authority to access surveillance.”

Natasha looks pretty calm still but Steve would bet she's not. “Then get Sir to authorise access to surveillance.”

“I'm afraid only Sir has the authority to make requests for authorising access to surveillance.”

Steve advances on the empty Hulk cage and spots a note taped to the inside of the glass.

_‘The author decided it was too much effort to keep me in this current arc so I've gone without any real explanation, miss you already. Lots of love, Deadpool.’_

He stares at it for a while, adds it to the list of things that currently make very little or no sense. It's getting distressingly long. It's longer than Sam's list of ‘stupid shit that Steve has done,’ and wow, he better make sure Sam doesn't share that list with Bucky now that he's back.

Because Bucky _is_ back and he _is_ staying. This whatever will get fixed and everything and everyone will be _fine_.

‘ _Buck,_ ’ he thinks, focusing on the pressure in his head. ‘ _The guy who did this has gone, no answers yet.’_

“Well isn't that just f-f-fucking A,” Bucky says.

Steve bites back an urge to laugh. Bucky has been the Winter Soldier for decades but here he is, cussing and sounding like he's lived his whole life in Red Hook. It makes Steve's heart ache, a tidal wave of fondness and nostalgia.

“I'm going to go and extract _authority_ from Tony,” Nat calls, letting Steve hear exactly how annoyed she is by this whole shit show. “Go back to medical, Steve.”

“Okay,” Steve says, and does. Not because he's started a new trend of doing as he's told but because that's where Bucky is and he's got nowhere else to be.

He sits back in his crappy plastic chair, putting his shield on the one next to him. He pats it absently right on the star.

“What is even going on?” he murmurs, but it's the Bucky in his brain, not the one in front of him that replies with a weary sounding, “fucked if I know, sweetheart.”

 

* * *

 

So. Stuck in Steve's brain. Which happens to look like Grand Central. And where Steve's voice periodically comes out of nowhere, telling him to keep calm and shit.

This is possibly the weirdest thing that has happened to Bucky in a long, disturbing career of weird.

“I'm not liking this, n-not one bit,” he says out loud.

“Me either,” Steve's voice says. Now Bucky's less freaked the fuck out he's worked out that it's coming through the goddamn speakers of the PA system. “I know I said I wanted you to stick around but this is a bit close even for me.”

Bucky snorts. He's about to make a comment but clacks his mouth shut and goes very, very still as he hears a faint rumble in the distance.

It's a goddamn train.

He sets off towards the noise, running across the concourse and through the arches towards the platforms. The noise gets louder and sure enough, he sprints up to track twenty to find a train just pulling in. Absolutely not, part of him thinks, but then the doors are sliding open and he's thinking that maybe it's his ticket out of here. Maybe he can escape Steve's brain by metaphor.

He takes a deep breath and jumps on.

The moment he's through the doors, he's not on a train anymore. His feet land in a small room in an apartment block, one that's distressingly, achingly familiar. He turns back to find the train doors have gone, replaced by the battered old wood of Steve's apartment door.

“Holy shit,” he whispers. He _remembers_ this place. The wooden floors, the side table propped up with a book, the art pinned up next to the single tiny window.

He wanders over to the table. There's a newspaper, dated 1942. He's more interested in the scraps of paper that are half tucked underneath though. They're sketches, messy drawings of faces that he either doesn't know or remember.

A rattle behind him makes him jump. The door opens and his heart promptly tries to jump out through his sternum as in comes Steve, followed by _him_ . Well, not exactly Steve, and not exactly him. It's Steve before he was Captain America, all short and scrawny, ninety-eight pounds of attitude. And it's James Buchanan Barnes, before all the war and torture and murder **.**

Bucky seizes up, fight or flight kicking in, but then James Buchanan Barnes and Steve are walking in and not even looking at him. He steps back but they don't appear to be able to see him at all.

“-already been told that you can't go,” James Buchanan Barnes is saying, sounding pretty pissed.

“Yeah, well, what do they know,” Steve replies, tossing his keys onto the table. James Buchanan Barnes reaches over with a very human left hand to scoop them up, hanging them on a hook by the door.

“They're medical professionals, Steve,” James Buchanan says. “And they said your heart alone-”

“My heart can handle it,” Steve shrugs.

James Buchanan makes a fist behind Steve's back, clenching it in frustration and knocking it against his own forehead. “Steve.”

Steve utterly ignores him because of course he does. He goes to open a cupboard, standing on his tip-toes and peering in. “You staying for dinner or what?”

James Buchanan sighs and sits down at the table. “Yeah I'm staying. You'll only run off and try enlist again if I leave you unattended.”

Steve leans back out of the cupboard and the little shit is actually grinning. “You know me so well,” he says brightly, and James Buchanan is failing to keep up the glare, looking down at the table and grinning right back.

“Oh,” Bucky says, very quiet and small. He doesn't remember this, but he remembers how he would have been feeling. Frustrated and amused despite himself. Worried and stupidly, dangerously in love.

He can't stand to look at his own stupid dumb happy smiling face. That face doesn't know what's coming and it needs to stop looking at Steve like that.

Bucky turns his back and lets himself out. Beyond the door is the corridor with its worn paint and grubby floorboards, but as he steps over the threshold something happens and he finds himself stumbling back onto the platform of track twenty.

He gapes at the train. “What the fuck.”

“Buck?” Steve's voice asks. “What's wrong?”

“So in- in- inside your head looks like Grand Central, right?”

“Yeah?”

“So a train. A train just showed up. I got on it and I'm pretty sure I ended up in one of your memories.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What, are you fuckin’ deaf?” Bucky says. “There was a t-t-t-train turned up, so I got on it and instead of it looking like the inside of a train carriage it was your old apartment. You were there, all small and shit.”

There's a very long pause. For so long that he's worried that the Steve voice has gone forever.

But then.

“I was small?”

Bucky resists the urge to bang his head against the side of the train. “I am s-stuck here watching old memories and _that's_ what you pick up on?”

“Well, you're the only-”

“Stop,” Bucky cuts across him, sudden. He can hear rumbling again. Another train. “There’s. There’s. _Fuck._ There’s another train, Imma see if it’s like the last one.”

“No!” Steve yelps. “Bucky, wait!”

Bucky doesn’t answer him. He sets off in the direction of the rattling and rumbling, determined to find the train. He can’t just sit here and do nothing, he’ll go crazy. Well, more crazy than he already is.

He finds the train. Jumps on board. Finds himself in what looks like a meeting room; Steve is sitting alone at the table, wearing a version of his uniform that Bucky’s never seen before. It’s brighter, somehow smoother. His helmet is discarded on the sleek black surface of the table. The shield is propped up against his chair leg.

“Steve?” he asks, just to check. The Steve here doesn’t react, just sits motionless with his head propped on his fist. He looks so _sad_ , Bucky thinks. When was this? Where is everyone else? Someone should be here with him.

Bucky steps closer. He watches as Steve blinks, absurdly long lashes sweeping up and down. As he does, a tear falls, running fast down his face. He reaches up, wipes his cheekbone with the back of his hand. His expression doesn’t change at all.

“Steve, no,” Bucky says helplessly. Goddamn, who is responsible for this? Why is he alone and crying? In fact - why is Steve sitting here like some sort of sad act? Why is he not getting up and doing something other than crying? Christ, this is why Bucky should never leave this mook unattended.

He waits it out but nothing else happens, so he hops back out of the room, lands his ass back on the platform.

“Steve!” he yells. “ _Steve!"_

“What?!” Steve’s voice crackles over the PA system.

“Why were you sat on your own in some m-meeting room and crying?”

There’s a long silence. Bucky’s scowls up at the speaker. He’ll go up there and punch it in a moment, see if Steve feels it.

“You can really see everything, huh?” Steve finally asks, quiet.

“Just what the trains show me, pal,” Bucky replies. He’s suddenly not angry anymore. “I won’t get on anymore if you I don’t want. I’ve had p-people poking around in my head without p-permission and I know you didn’t sign up for this.”

“It’s okay,” Steve says. “I guess this is one way for us to catch up with each other.”

Bucky’s still not sure. In fact, he’s starting to feel about about the two trains he has boarded without consent. He’s startling to feel bad about the fact he’s in Steve’s brain without consent.

“Buck, you there?”

Bucky rubs at his forehead. “Sure am.”

“I got nothing to hide from you,” Steve says quietly. “Look at anything you like.”

Well, that’s definitely permission, permission that makes Bucky feel safe and loved and like he should have done more to be with Steve. With it, Bucky can stop feeling bad and start being a nosey fucker again. “Alright. Back to exploring,” he says. “Remember something, let’s see if it - if it shows up.”

 

* * *

 

Bucky jumps off the train that says it’s bound for New Haven but instead had dumped him in the middle of a fricking forest in the Ardennes. He can still smell the smoke and hear the laughter of the Howling Commandos. “S-stop thinking about the war,” he shouts up at the speakers. “That’s seven in a row! And I was in s-six of them!”

“So sorry, I thought your ego would appreciate me focusing on you.”

“Shut up and give- give- give me something I don’t already know.”

“I’m not really in control of these, Buck,” Steve says. “I can kind of guide them but-”

“Hang on, there’s something coming in on twelve,” Bucky says. “Something juicy, I hope.”

He can practically feel Steve’s exasperation seeping through the walls. “You seem to be enjoying poking around in my brain far too much.”

Bucky kind of is. He’s long since learned that his life is a long series of shit, so he might as well make the best of it. And he’s leaning so much about Steve. He’s seen him fighting aliens alongside the Avengers, covered in brick dust and seething; watched him pushing a motorbike to over a hundred and ten along an otherwise deserted highway; followed him around New York on separate days in all seasons. He’s seen him on the schoolyard at eight years old, training - or trying to train - at camp Leigh when he twenty-two, busting out of a SHIELD holding facility at ninety. He’s seen him arguing with Iron Man, watching TV with Black Widow, drinking beer and playing pool with Hawkeye and Falcon.

In short, he’s all up in Steve’s business and he’s greedy for it. He wants to jump on every goddamn train Steve’s stupid Grand Central brain can offer up.

The train on twelve is silver, windows dark. Bucky leaps on board, eager to see more of Steve’s memory-

“What the fuck?”

He’s in a church. Steve is standing at the far end, next to Bucky. They’re both wearing military greens and Bucky’s grinning ear to ear, muttering to Steve who is looking excited but nervous. There are people sitting in the pews, indistinct unrecognisable faces. No, hold up, that’s Steve’s ma sitting in the front row.

Holy shit, this is Steve’s wedding.

Did Steve get married? Was Bucky there for it? Did he stand there and watch the love of his life get hitched to someone else, and did Hydra then make him forget it ever happened -

No, wait, hang on Steve’s _ma_ is there.

Steve’s ma certainly didn’t live long enough to see Steve and Bucky join the army, so something here is not right. On high alert, Bucky edges further into the church. He thinks he recognises some of the faces but he can’t pinpoint them. And then is attention is well and truly diverted by the church doors opening, revealing Peggy Carter in a white dress.

Oh.

Bucky feels his heart drop down to his feet. He feels about an inch tall. He looks back to see Steve beaming, smiling like Peggy is his whole universe. And he knows this memory is bullshit because memory-Bucky is also grinning ear to ear, looking proud. He knows he’s not that good an actor.

He ducks out of the memory, landing on his knees on the platform. He can’t really find the strength to stand up.

“Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you ever get m-married?”

“What? No.”

“Let me guess, you thought about it though.”

There’s a long silence. Bucky can feel Steve’s wariness and trepidation rolling through the station like a storm cloud.

“Might have done. Why?”

Bucky sighs, rubbing at his face with his hands. “I don’t think the t-trains are just showing me memories any more.”

 

* * *

 

If anyone were to ask him, Steve would tell them that he is not lying face down on his couch because he’s having a mental breakdown. He wouldn’t have a good answer for why he’s lying face down in his cushions, because ‘my best friend is currently in my brain looking at all my memories and thoughts’ is barely anything he can wrap his head around, let alone get anyone else to understand.

“This is so messed up,” he says into the cushions.

“I know,” Bucky’s voice replies, sounding exhausted himself. “Hey. Hey. You. You eating donuts in bed? Memory or fantasy?”

Steve groans. He really wishes Bucky wouldn’t call them fantasies. Mostly because too much free time and a connection to the internet has updated Steve’s actual bank of fantasies, and if a train shows up that’s anything like his Incognito search history, he’s going to die of embarrassment. “Not a memory that’s for sure.”

“You d-dream of eating donuts in bed?”

“I’m a man of simple pleasures,” Steve says, and it takes him a moment to place the sound he gets in response as laughter. Soft and not entirely convincing but laughter nonetheless.

He rolls onto his back, staring at the ceiling. “It’s good to hear you laugh, Buck.”

“Circumstances are less than desirable but yeah. I’m. I’m glad to be with you.”

“This is...you’re lying upstairs in a hospital bed. I’m still not convinced that this isn’t me going crazy.”

“I’m in your t-t-train-station brain, I’m definitely thinking there’s some crazy going around.”

“I hear that.”

“Hear what?” a voice says that’s definitely not Bucky. Steve jerks his head up to find Clint standing in his doorway with his bow in hand and a quizzical expression on his face. Oh man. That’s the face Clint pulls when he’s about to do something that requires a call to either Natasha or the ER.

“What?” Steve says, pushing himself into a sitting position, scattering throw cushions as he goes. Happily none the wiser, Bucky carries on talking, debating if the time the Red Skull pulled off his own face counts as crazier than this current clusterfuck.

“Who were you talking to?” Clint asks, looking around suspiciously.

“Uh, you,” Steve tries. Bucky’s working himself up into a rant now, about how fucked up their current predicament is. Steve lifts a hand, automatically going to rap his knuckles against his temple to try and stop the tirade. He aborts half way through, realising that it would probably make Clint even more suspicious.

Clint’s frown deepens as he watches Steve flap a hand around aimlessly, before he shoves it in his pocket. ‘ _Bucky, shut up,_ ’ he thinks desperately.

“What?!”

“You didn’t know I was here, did you?”

‘ _Clint is here and no-one knows you’re in my brain!’_

“You’re acting weird,” Clint says. “Do I need to take you back to medical?”

“Why the fuck haven’t you told anyone?”

“Uh,” Steve tries to focus enough to reply to Bucky, instinctively throwing out a hand to stop Clint from talking, which is a futile endeavour.

“Sit down,” Clint says. “Seriously, you’re going to-”

“You b-b-b better not be trying to deal with this on your own!”

“I’m fine-”

“You are not f-f-fuckin fine, you need to tell someone!”

“I’m not telling anyone!”

“Jarvis, call Helen! Call Bruce! I don’t care what type of doctor he is-”

“No!” Steve yells, panicked. “Bucky, just shut up for a damn minute, Clint, don’t call anyone!”

Both the room and the inside of his brain fall silent. Steve huffs out a breath, jamming the heels of his hands into his eyes. He’s getting a headache.

“Uh….” Clint raises his hand. “Did you just call me Bucky? Because I mean, you’re awesome but I don’t feel ready to step into the role of sidekick, and I don’t suit domino masks or booty shorts-”

“No, I was talking to Bucky,” Steve says. “I think that when Deadpool and his friend knocked me out, they transferred Bucky’s consciousness into my brain.”

Clint blinks at him, brows shooting up. He looks a lot like the blinking man meme that Sam keeps posting on the group WhatsApp, usually after Tony says anything. “Uh, what?”

“He’s up here,” Steve says, tapping his temple. “Talking to me and going through my memories and thoughts and stuff.”

“Steve, w-what’s. What’s going on?”

“I’m explaining to Clint that you’re in my brain,” Steve says out loud. “I think he thinks I’m crazy.”

“Uh, I definitely think you’re crazy,” Clint volunteers.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Steve says. “Clint, please.”

“We’ve got to tell someone!” Clint insists. “If we’ve broken Captain America’s brain, someone needs to know!”

“Clint,” Steve says, stepping forwards and gripping hold of his upper arms. “Please. I don’t want everyone freaking out and I don’t want them poking and prodding at Bucky. We’re going to find Deadpool and get him to sort it out.”

Clint looks at him carefully, uncharacteristically serious. Finally, he speaks. “Alright,” he says. “But only because I don’t want anyone poking at Barnes’ brain while he can’t give permission. And also because no-one ever trusts me with secrets so I’m kind of feeling important right now.”

Steve could kiss him, honestly. He decides it might create more questions than he’s got the energy to answer. He opts for clapping his hand against Clint’s shoulder in a gesture approved by modern standards of masculinity. “Thank you.”

Clint nods, eyes flicking up to Steve’s forehead. “He’s really in there?”

“Yup,” Steve says. “I wanted to keep him close, but damn.”

Clint cackles at that. “Yeah that’s a bit much,” he agrees. “So. Finding Deadpool?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Finding Deadpool.”

“Sleep first,” Clint says, and looks surprised when Steve just nods in agreement rather than arguing about it. They part ways with a hand-clasp bro hug and Steve is left to his own devices, though not completely alone. 

Maybe he’s never going to be alone ever again.

He’s not sure if that’s comforting or downright terrifying.

 

* * *

 

Steve goes to bed, wondering if he is ever going to be able to get to sleep. Bucky is still rattling around inside his brain, busy hopping more trains, managing a quiet goodnight between a train showing memories of the Battle of New York and one of Steve driving a motorbike at speeds that make Steve suspect that it’s another fantasy. Dream. Whatever. He sighs, rolls over, prepares himself for a night of staring at the ceiling. He's fast asleep within a minute.

He wakes in what he thinks is a dream. He feels the sensation of cold stone under his back, opens his eyes to see a royal-blue ceiling, decorated with golden constellations. He hears the faint sound of wheels clacking on rails echoing on stone.

Oh, hell.

He sits up and sure enough, he’s sitting on his ass in Grand Central Station. Empty and echoing, looking more like it did in nineteen-forty than it does nowadays. There’s no Starbucks at least.

“Steve!”

He looks up and his heart implodes because _there’s Bucky_ , sprinting down the stairs from the upper concourse, eyes wild. Steve scrambles up, not even caring that he appears to only be wearing the thin pajama pants that he went to sleep in. He runs towards Bucky, only concerned about getting to him as fast as he possibly can.

The collide on the lower concourse, nearly pitching over with the force of the hug. Bucky’s arms are locked around his neck and Steve’s got him around the middle, clutching him so tightly that someone’ll probably have to use a crowbar to get them apart.

“Oh my g-god how are you here?” Bucky asks, voice muffled by Steve’s shoulder.

“I just went to sleep,” Steve says. “Fuck, Bucky, I was so worried-”

“I hurt you,” Bucky says. “I heard them saying the words and then, and then I was g-gone.”

“Shhh, it’s okay, I told you already it’s okay,” Steve says. He clumsily strokes a hand over Bucky’s hair, wondering if he’ll send Bucky skittering away from him, but Bucky just shudders and melts against him, holding on even tighter. Steve finds he’s absolutely okay with that, and absently wonders how long it’s been since Bucky’s been held, or even touched without being hurt. 

Then he realizes just how long it’s been since _he’s_ been held like this.

They break apart a long while later, some unspoken agreement to take a step back. Bucky won’t go far though, standing at Steve’s side and staring at him like he’s hungry, like he wants to drink in every detail of Steve’s face. He blushes as Bucky clearly looks over his bare chest, but Steve lets him, knowing all too well how it feels, the way someone can want to memorise every detail of someone like it’s the last time they’ll ever get to see it. He doesn't exactly know how he’s ended up here with him but he’ll take it. Right now, he’d happily stay here forever. 

They walk around the station together, shoulder to shoulder. It’s briefly weird that Bucky is basically giving Steve a tour around his own brain, but on the current scale of weird that they're dealing with, it’s shouldn’t even really a blip on the radar. Weirdness aside, they talk about the fight, about Bucky turning up. He doesn’t seem entirely happy to have been manipulated by Hydra like that, but the overriding feeling is that he’s just relieved to have ended up back with Steve.

“I didn't think you were gonna stay,” Steve admits.

Bucky shrugs. “Wasn't,” he says, and Steve wonders what would happen if he threw himself under a train right now, though maybe that’s him being slightly over-dramatic. “But then I ended up here...and seeing all this m-made me realise how much I missed you. So. Yeah. If you’ll have me, I’ll stay.”

Steve ducks his head, smiling wide enough so that his cheeks hurt. “You’re in my brain, Buck, you’re not going anywhere.” 

“Well, if they get me out and b-b-b-back in my own b-body....There’s a lot of people who are gonna want me gone.”

“They can go through me,” Steve says. He gets the briefest glimpse of Bucky’s tentative smile before suddenly everything is going dark. He lunges for Bucky but the darkness is overwhelming and complete; he has a moment to panic but then he’s opening his eyes and blinking at the ceiling of his bedroom again.

“Bucky?!” 

“Yeah, I’m here,” Bucky's voice says. “You just vanished.” 

“I woke up,” Steve says, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been quite so disappointed about waking up ever, not even that time he woke up to find out his whole world was gone and buried, lost to the pages of history.

 

* * *

  

Unable to get back to sleep after waking up and leaving Bucky, Steve gets out of bed. He tidies up the few possessions he has in his apartment. Sam always says that the tower won’t feel like home until Steve starts treating it like one. Steve says he’s too traumatised by inflation to go out shopping, because spending over a dollar in one go makes him panic. 

Sam also says that Steve is full of shit.

Tidying up done, he sits down and doodles on the back of a newspaper for a bit. Then he recycles it and washes up the one plate and one cup that are in his sink.

Then he gives in. 

“Bucky?” 

“Yeah?” Bucky replies. “Did you really jump out of a g-goddamn jet with no parachute?”

“No,” Steve lies. “That’s a dream.” 

“A fuckin’ nightmare,” Bucky grumbles, and Steve has to laugh. In fact he laughs so hard he has to hold on to the edge of the counter.

“You okay? Isn’t it. Isn’t it like one in the morning?” 

“Yeah. Can’t get back to sleep.” 

“You think if you d-d-did, you’d end up. You’d end up here with me?” Bucky sounds almost wistful. 

“I hope so,” Steve says honestly. “I wouldn’t say no to another hug.”

“Are you lonely?” Bucky asks. 

Steve shuts his eyes. “No,” he says. “No, I’m okay.” 

There’s a long pause. “You got a radio?” 

“Yeah, why?” 

“That’s what you used to do when you couldn’t sleep,” Bucky says, uncertain. It’s like he’s unsure about how his interjections will go down. “You used to listen to the radio and draw.”

Steve remembers. Nods slowly. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll try that. Thanks Buck.” 

Sam says he never does as he’s told but clearly Sam doesn’t know shit because Steve does exactly what Bucky has suggested, even going into his office to get out the unused sketchbook that Natasha had gifted him three birthdays ago. He fiddles with his I-pod dock - not quite a radio but it’ll have to do - and puts on the playlist that he calls his workout slash guilty pleasure playlist.

Barely thirty seconds in and Bucky interrupts with a panicked, “Steve?!” 

“Yeah?” Steve asks, pleased to find he’s able to concentrate on both the Bucky-presence in his brain and the curve of drawing-Bucky’s shoulder on the page.

“Who is the b-b-bitch and why do you owe her money?”

Steve freezes. “You can hear that?!”

“Yeah I can fuckin hear it! Your music taste has gone seriously downhill since we last hung out, pal.” 

Steve slumps back in his chair, pressing his sketchbook over his face and laughing so hard he cries.

 

* * *

 

In Clint’s humble opinion, Steve isn’t looking so good. Well, maybe that’s not really an adequate descriptor for the sorry sight currently in front of his eyes. Steve looks like _shit._  He’s slouching around the communal kitchen, scowling at everything up to and including the Keurig. Clint likes to think he’s a fair person, but if Steve makes one wrong move towards his coffee maker then Clint’s going to shoot him.

“Morning Cap,” he says, and gets a grunt in return. He wonders if Steve is monosyllabic because he’s tired and cranky or if he’s too busy talking telepathically to Bucky. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks,” Steve says, stirring his coffee with a viciousness that’s gonna end up with broken crockery or a bent spoon. “That’s the look I was going for this morning, so I’m glad someone noticed.”

“I noticed,” Tony says.

“It’s hard to miss,” Natasha says.

“Your face is making me sad,” Rhodey says.

“You should go back to bed,” Sam says.

“We’ve got a problem,” Bruce says, walking into the room and looking grave.

“What? Another one?”

“Shit.”

“Are you kidding?”

“We’ve got enough to deal with!”

“I’m not leaving Bucky.” 

Everyone turns to stare at Steve, incredulous. He makes Kermit-face and crosses his arms across his chest. “I’m not and no-ones gonna make me.”

“What if the world's ending?” Tony asks. 

Steve just glares at him, either trying to convey ‘don’t be facetious Tony, I was being hyperbolic for dramatic effect, of course the world takes precedence,’ or ‘the world can suck a fat one.’ Clint’s honestly not sure which one it is. 

“Well Bucky is the problem, so you don’t have to go anywhere,” Bruce says. “Steve, you might want to sit down.”

Steve, predictably, does not. “Tell me,” he says in Captain voice.

Bruce looks like he’d very much like to be somewhere else. “Uh, we hooked Bucky up to a new system to monitor his vitals,” he says, taking a shuffling step backwards and holding out a pacifying hand as Steve’s nostrils flare in anger. “And...he’s not showing any brain activity. Technically he’s dead.” 

Everyone tenses hard, like the time they were all watching Tony stop and ask for coffee midway through defusing a bomb. Only this time the bomb is Steve and Clint thinks he could level a wider blast area than a rogue block of C4.

One eye screwed shut in anticipation of detonation, he looks at Steve.

Steve blinks, then slumps. “No,” he sighs, rubbing at his temple. “He’s not.”

Everyone exchanges glances, mystified. 

“Steve...his heart might be beating and he’s breathing but there’s no brain activity,” Bruce says slowly, like he's trying to explain nuclear fusion to a toddler, or you know, to Clint. “I don’t know how-”

“So he’s in a coma?” Tony interrupts. “Or a vegetative state?” 

“No,” Steve says shortly, getting up and taking his mug of coffee with him. “Everything’s fine. We just need to work on a plan to get Deadpool back here.” 

“Deadpool?”

“Why do you want him back?”

“He nearly melted your brain last time.”

“What do you think he did to you?”

“Fuck no, that guy’s crazy.”

Steve ignores all of the questions. “I’m going up to check on Bucky and then we need to call a team meeting to discuss strategy for tracking down Deadpool.”

“And for dealing with the Hydra incursion that happened yesterday?” Sam adds, looking at Steve through narrowed eyes.

“Yeah and that,” Steve says, but he’s halfway out of the door and his shoulders aren’t as expressive as his face but they still clearly say, ‘I care about that less than I probably should.’ 

The moment he’s gone, Tony says, “So twenty bucks says this is Cap’s super villain origin story?”

There’s a beat and then everyone shrugs and gets out their wallets.

 

* * *

 

Bucky stands on the platform, waiting for a train to come in. Steve’s told him that he’s going to a meeting with the other Avengers so Bucky needs to pipe down and not distract him. Bucky privately thinks it’s bullshit that Steve won’t confide in his team, but he doesn’t know if that’s stubbornness on Steve’s part or untrustworthiness on the team’s.

He also doesn’t know what’ll happen if he has to stay here forever. He’s not needed to eat, drink or sleep while he’s been here - he’s also quietly thanked a god he no longer really believes in that he’s not had to use the station bathrooms. Doing his business in Steve’s brain just feels like overstepping a boundary.

He taps his metal fingers again the railings, soft _clink clink clink_ sounds as he waits.

“Bucky, I can hear that.”

“Hmm?” he asks, not really listening.

“The tapping. Can you stop.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow. “If you can stop the walls singing ‘turn down for what.’”

“It’s stuck in my head, that’s as irritating for me as it is for you!”

“Sure,” Bucky says and goes back to drumming his fingers against the railing.

“Bucky,” Steve says, sounding exasperated.

Then he hears it.

Something caught between a cold wind rushing down a mountain and the groan of a dying man. It’s distant and faint but makes him shiver nonetheless. His hands still on the bar.

“Thanks,” Steve says but Bucky’s definitely not listening. He steps away from the railing, on high alert. He can still hear it, the strange deep groan of wind, rushing through the building somewhere.

He follows it down through the station, through a service door and down into one of the disused tracks. It’s cold down here, unfriendly in a way that the rest of the station isn’t. Every fibre of his being is telling him to get away, to go back to the light and warmth of the main concourse. 

He ignores his instincts, slowly walks closer. The tracks lead into a tunnel, it’s wide gaping maw quickly descending into darkness. He can hear water dripping somewhere he can’t see.

“Steve,” he whispers. There’s no reply. He hesitates, then slowly moves to the edge of the platform, crouching before dropping down onto the tracks. He shivers, fighting down on the fear he feels. He may be a world renowned assassin, but without constant brainwashing to keep his emotions at bay, he knows how and when to admit he’s scared of something.

And this dark tunnel in Steve’s mind is something he feels very scared of.

“Bucky? Bucky!”

He hears the call of his name, faint and distant. He stares at the black mouth of the tunnel a little longer and then backs away, climbing back up onto the platform and making his way swiftly back towards the main hall.

“Steve?”

“Buck,” Steve breathes, clearly relieved. “Where did you go?”

Bucky ponders his answer for a moment. “I’m not sure,” he says, “There was...a t-tunnel. Dark, cold. Something’s not quite right in that corner of your b-brain, pal.”

“Don’t go down it,” Steve says. “Hear me, Buck?”

Bucky’s slightly taken aback. Steve’s been nothing but chill about Bucky delving through his brain and now he sounds all strict and uptight and more like his Ma than Bucky ever thought possible.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” Steve says in that familiar way he has, the way he shuts down conversations without compromise. “Just leave it alone yeah, Buck?

Bucky looks back towards the service corridor, where he knows the tunnel and tracks are still waiting.

“You gonna get some sleep tonight? Come visit me again?”

He feels Steve relax. “I’m gonna try my best,” he says. “I promise.”


	4. Chapter 4

Steve seriously contemplates either running away or going to lie down somewhere once the meeting is over. His ma didn't raise him a quitter so he reluctantly stays in the building and says he's going for a nap. Sam says if he does, there’ll be no stopping the torrent of old man jokes that will undoubtedly come his way. Steve says he’ll go to Fox News and sell his story about the Avengers bullying a nonegarian veteran. Sam reminds him that a Fox News hate him, ever since he made that public statement - rant, Sam says it was a bona fide rant - about the administration's approach to vaccinations. Whatever, Bucky would agree with him.

He tells Sam as such. Sam stares at him. “Great. When we get Barnes up and running the PR team are going to die. You’re bad enough on your own.”

“What, like hating polio is such a bad thing.”

“You never had polio.”

“I did too. Ask Bucky.”

“I sense Bucky is going to be a terrible enabler.”

“ _ You’re _ a terrible enabler.”

“I suppose I am,” Sam grins, and Steve briefly feels guilty about not telling him the truth. Sam’s grin fades too quickly, maybe sensing Steve’s betrayal. “While we’re talking about Bucky.”

“What about him?”

“So, he turns up and you look like it’s the best day ever, like Christmas and July fourth and Hannukah all rolled into one. He goes all Winter Soldier on you and instead of running away, you run at him and let him kick your ass - he did too kick your ass, don’t give me that look - and now, Bruce says he’s dead and you don’t even flip a table? Even your sense of denial isn’t that strong.”

Steve sighs. Well, at least feeling guilty about keeping Sam in the dark won’t last long. He turns his thoughts inwards. “ _ Buck. Sam suspects.” _

“Tell him,” Bucky replies immediately. “Stop trying to shoulder this on your own.”

“I can get by on my own,” Steve murmurs.

“I will kick your ass from inside your own brain, Rogers!”

“Uh, What?” Sam asks. “You talking to me?”

“No,” Steve says. He sighs, debates getting his phone out to film Sam’s reaction to this next bit. “I’m talking to Bucky. He's in my head. Bruce can’t find any brain activity because Bucky’s consciousness accidentally got transferred into my brain by Deadpool and the necromancer.”

Sam opens his mouth. Closes it again. Presses his palm over his mouth. Points at Steve. Shakes his head. Finally, he puts his hands on his hips. “What?”

“Deadpool and his friend tried to help Bucky with his brain damage,” Steve says. “They screwed it up. Now Bucky’s in my head. He says it looks like Grand Central.”

Sam takes a moment to process. “I’m calling an Assemble.”

“Sam, no!”

“Steve, shut your mouth before I go full scale mutiny on your ass. I will call Obama or the Pentagon or whoever I need and have you busted down to private,” Sam says. “We’re telling the team and that’s final.”

 

* * *

 

“Bucky’s  _ where _ ?”

“Deadpool did what?”

“How is that even possible?”

“He’s inside your brain?!”

“Oh man, I’m not important now  _ everyone _ knows.”

Everyone rounds on Clint, who realises his mistake a second too late and cringes. “Oops?” He tries, aiming for a winning smile instead. He doesn’t think anyone is buying it. No matter, they’re all too busy refocusing on Steve who is sitting there with his elbow on the table and head propped on his fist. He looks like he did after the battle of New York. 99% completely done with it. It being  _ everything _ .

“You told Barton?” Tony demands, sounding outraged.

“I’m still stuck on,” Rhodey waves a hand vaguely at a Steve, “transfer of consciousness?”

“It’s not possible,” Tony says.

“You just sounded mad that he told Clint!”

“Yes, he should have told  _ me _ his clearly made up drama first.”

“I’m not making it up,” Steve gets out. His jaw is doing the clenchy thing again. Clint tries to catch Nat’s eye to mime ‘fifty on Steve punching Stark,’ but she’s busy watching Steve with a narrow-eyed cat look that makes Clint instinctively want to shield all his squishy parts, even though it’s not him she’s aiming the look at.

“You expect us to believe that Barnes’ brain is in your brain?”

“Yes,” Steve says. “He says it looks like Grand Central up there.” He snorts out a laugh, then says, “toldja they wouldn’t believe me. No! What, I’m not telling them that, there’s no point. Who cares that only you know that story, they’ll just think I’m making it up.”

Clint tries to stop the giggle, though it’s probably a lost cause. Rhodes is looking alarmed, Sam has the market on disturbed and Tony is actually speechless. Clint lifts his phone to snap a picture. Nat pointedly pushes his hand back down.

“You all owe me twenty bucks,” Tony finally manages.

“You’re not helping,” Steve says flatly, and Clint has no idea who he’s talking to anymore.

The argument is cut short by the blaring of the Avengers alarm, which means someone in a police precinct somewhere has sufficiently panicked the commissioner into unlocking three levels of security in order to slam his hand against a completely cliched red button. Clint had voted for the bat signal type alert but had been shouted down in favour of the noisy option.

Nearly everyone reacts as they normally do: a few jumps, a lot of groaning, a smattering of curse words. Steve, however, reacts in a way that is maybe a teensy bit different to his usual back-straightening, jaw-clenching, I-mean-business pose: he lurches upright and then doubles over and throws up, narrowly missing Clint’s feet again.

“Whoa!”

“Shit!”

“Again?!”

“Cap!”

“Someone call Helen!”

Steve screws his eyes shut, clutching the edge of the table. “Bucky, calm down,” he says hoarsely. “It’s the Avengers alert goddamnit, don’t panic - Bucky!” He takes a few deep breaths, in and out, back heaving. His fingers twitch and the edge of the glass table cracks. “Buck, imma need you to calm down pal, you’re making me feel a little off.”

If throwing up on the floor of the meeting room is ‘a little off,’ then Clint would hate to see Cap when he’s really sick. Clint’s thought it before and will definitely think it again: Cap is fucking  _ metal _ .

Everyone is staring at Steve. Tony distractedly waves his hands in the air, cutting the alarm.

“There we go, easy, easy,” Steve says, still with his eyes closed. “Nothing’s gonna hurt you. Nothing, not while I’m around. Just an alarm from the cops, gotta go help. That’s all it is, you’re not hurt, you’re safe, okay?”

Clint feels the wariness in the room shift to a strange uncomfortable awkwardness. The way Steve’s talking to Bucky isn’t how anyone would expect a conversation with the freaking Winter Soldier to go. It’s less murdery and more kind of...sad.

Finally, Steve opens his eyes. He nods once, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll clean that up later,” he says, like he’s daring anyone to mention it. “Get moving, Avengers, we’ve got a distress call to answer.”

He strides from the room without looking back. Clint blows out a breath, shaking his head in fervent admiration.

Fucking metal as  _ fuck _ . 

 

* * *

 

Sam tells Steve he should sit this one out. Steve tells Sam to kiss his ass. Steve wins the argument because of course he does, and within twenty minutes he’s standing outside one of Manhattan’s many Starbucks, slinging his shield at an eight foot crocodilian that’s wearing a lab coat. The general consensus is that no one is surprised that scientist-lizard hybrids have appeared out of a building housing New York’s latest bio-genetics firm, but maybe someone somewhere should have had more of an inkling that something was awry. Steve doesn’t mind a good fight but he thinks maybe Biogen’s board of trustees should have shut down this particular business venture before it culminated in Komodo dragons with PHDs.

Come on. He’s read Jurassic Park, but it seems no one else has. Messing with lizards and DNA always ends in disaster.

“W-w-w-what’s hap-happening?”  Bucky asks, urgent and stammering worse than ever.

Steve catches his shield, uses it to bash a chameleon over the head. “Kinda busy here!”

“I can, I can feel your stress, it’s like earthqu- earthqu- qu-  _ goddamnit _ , earthshaking in here-”

A hissing lizard jumps down in front of him. Steve punches it right in the face. “Yeah, we’re fighting giant lizards-”

“What the, what the  _ fuck _ -”

“It’s okay there’s just loads of them-”

“Giant lizards, Steve!”

“Yes, I know that,  _ Bucky _ , I’m the one punching them!”

To underscore his point, Steve leaps over a Prius and smashes both booted feet into the chest of another lab-reptile. He can literally feel Bucky getting ready to snap back, but he loses focus as Tony’s voice comes over the comms, sounding exasperated. “Cap you are literally the embodiment of old man yells at cloud right now.”

“I’m yelling at Bucky,” Steve gets out through gritted teeth.

“F-f-f-fuck you,” Bucky bites out. “W-what the hell, what’s going on?!”

Goddamn snipers, never like not being able to see everything. And that's added to the fact that underneath it all, Bucky is a goddamn nosey bitch who always hated being left out of anything.

“I’m  _ busy _ , I can’t exactly give you a blow by blow-”

“I said you should have sat this one out,” says Sam, in his most maddeningly smug tone.

“Stop talking to yourself or we’ll drop you from comms!” Tony shouts.

“Fuck you, I’m talking to Bucky,” Steve snaps.

“Oh my god Cap, you can’t cuss at people like that!” Clint cackles madly. “You’re Captain America.”

“I can and I will,” Steve says petulantly, and then takes his comm unit out of his ear and stashes it in a pocket. He’d throw it in the goddamn sewers but he knows how bitchy Tony would get if he were to treat his Starktech with anything but reverence.

“I just need you to be c-careful,” Bucky says, tone somewhere between a warning and a plea. “Don’t get hurt-”

“Kind of comes with the territory.” Steve glances around. There are lizards  _ everywhere _ now that he’s closer to the Biogen building. He can hear sirens and the frantic yelling of the poor suckers who were on shift with the NYPD at the time of the accident. Civilians are screaming and there’s the thud of a chopper somewhere above. In the distance there’s a unnervingly gleeful roar which sounds like the Hulk has had enough of letting everyone else have all the fun.

And then, one very disturbing, echoing thud. It rattles the ground under his feet, shaking everything slightly before going still. Steve thinks maybe taking his comm out in a fit of pettiness maybe wasn’t the best idea. Especially when the earth-shaking thud is followed by another, then another.

“Steve what is ha-happening, I can - feel you panicking-”

“I am not,” Steve replies, insulted. “I’m Captain America.” The ‘so panicking is not a luxury I have,’ goes unsaid.

“You are,” Bucky insists and Steve screws his eyes closed and plants a gloved hand over his eyes, just giving himself a second to try and focus, wishing that either Bucky wasn’t in his brain or that he had some goddamn way of seeing what Steve can see, to stop him fretting and bombarding Steve with requests for information.

He takes a steadying breath, drops his hand, looks up towards the Biogen building.

Bucky yelps loud enough for it to  _ hurt _ .

“Ouch, Bucky, don’t do that-!”

“I c-can see!” Bucky blurts out. “The windows, I can see outta the windows! Jesus, is that goddamn lizard wearing a stethoscope?!”

Huh, Steve thinks, wildly fighting the urge to laugh. How bout that.

The urge to laugh lasts 3.2 seconds, because that’s how long it takes for a tyrannosaur to burst out through the front doors of the Biogen building, showering concrete and glass over the police cordon. It lowers its head and roars, black slime burbling from its jaws and hissing acidly as it hits the ground. It stomps a foot agitatedly, blank white eyes rolling.

“Oh holy mother of fuck,” Bucky says. “Steve, don’t even think about it-”

Too late, Steve is already running towards the tyrannosaur. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a red and gold blur rush towards it too, and it is kinda nice to know he isn’t the only idiot on the team charging towards the acid-spitting tyrannosaur.

“You are not going hand to hand with that thing, are you crazy?!” Bucky shouts.

Steve slides into the side of an abandoned armoured vehicle, peering around just in time to see Iron Man get knocked out of the air, followed swiftly by the chopper. It careers into the side of a skyscraper, igniting in flames which only seem to piss off the mutant Rex even more. “I gotta do something-”

Something comes to him without conscious thought. He has no idea why he does but he looks into the jeep, grabs an abandoned rifle and levels it at the Rex.  _ Focus _ , a voice tells him, one that sounds suspiciously like Bucky but isn’t; Bucky has mercifully fallen silent.  _ Breathe. Wind shear. Exhale. Fire. _

The bullet hits the Rex right in the eye. It jerks back, opens its mouth to roar and instead decides to keel over backwards instead.

Bucky let’s out a whoop then immediately starts chewing Steve out. He vaguely catches words like ‘idiot,’ ‘goddamn idiot,’ and ‘fuckin’ idiot,’ but is otherwise busy staring at the fallen body of the Rex which is being pumped full of bullets by every NYPD officer in the vicinity. Either they’re double checking it’s dead or are just that pissed at it.

“Bucky,” Steve says, stopping Bucky’s rant midway through ‘ _ your ma will be turning in her grave!’ _

“What?!”

“Was that you?”

Bucky goes from spitting mad to uncertain. “I d-d-don’t think so? Not consciously. I mean, I saw the rifle and thought that’s what I’d do but I didn’t tell you to or make you do it…”

He trails off. “Huh,” Steve says, and takes a step back before giving up and just sitting on his ass right there on the remnants of the sidewalk. “How ‘bout that.”

 

* * *

 

Clint thinks he’s in love.

Well, not the regular completely in love with, would sell organs for, want to stroke her hair type love he’s got going on for Nat. A different type of love - more, ‘that was the most badass thing I have ever seen and I want to watch Cap shoot down a mutant tyrannosaur on repeat for the rest of eternity.’

He catches up with Cap and tells himself that he needs to act normal and not like a starry-eyed sidekick. It’s made easier by the fact that Cap is sitting on his ass and not paying anything other than the dead tyrannosaur any attention whatsoever.

“Lame,” Clint says, just to cover his mental boner for Cap’s competence and cool in the face of eight tonnes of sharp-fanged danger. “I thought for sure you were going to punch it.”

There’s the thudding of giant, possibly-dinosaur-sized footsteps rushing towards them and Clint wheels around with his heart in his mouth, but it’s just Hulk. He lumbers to a stop just behind Steve, frowning. “Hulk play with big dinosaur,” he says, then honest to god narrows his eyes at Steve who still has the rifle in hand. “Hulk want to  _ play _ ,” he laments then turns his back and sits down with a huff, shooting Steve dirty looks over his shoulder.

“Okay,” a modulated voice calls. Iron Man is up again, hovering just behind them. One repulsor boot is spitting fitfully, obviously not built to withstand the force of a T-Rex headbutt. “Cap, in no way do I want to feed your ego or make this all about you, but that was a hell of a shot.”

“I’ve not used a gun since nineteen forty-four,” Steve says distantly, still staring as one brave slash unbelievably moronic individual climbs atop the Rex carcass, gleefully jumping up and down. New Yorkers, man. Hulk perks up but Clint pointedly shakes his head; Hulk huffs again and goes back to sulking.

“Lies,” Tony says to Steve, landing next to Clint with a crunch of asphalt. “You picked one up on the helicarrier when we were fighting Loki.”

“Can't expect me to remember every little detail, I'm a senior citizen,” Steve says and Tony chokes on a laugh.

“Cap does jokes now? Is this a thing? Can we keep Barnes in his brain? I’m assuming that’s where the sense of humour has come from.”

“So you believe me now?” Steve asks Tony. He blinks himself out of his daze and climbs to his feet.

“Jury’s out.”

Still scanning the area, Clint spots a flash of red and his heart leaps. He goes as far as to take an aborted running step towards Nat but checks himself at the last minute. She notices, of course she does, so Clint just gives her a sheepish wave. She looks unhurt, thank god.

He wonders if the feels he gets when he spots Nat safe and sound are the same as the feels Steve got when he saw Bucky arrive at the airport battle. Well, almost the same feels because if they were the same then that’d be pretty gay.

“Cap,” she says as she walks up, touching Clint’s elbow as she passes. In Clint’s mind he keeps his heart in his elbows, so every time she does it she’s touching his heart. Romantic as fuck, he thinks.

“Nat,” Steve replies, glancing at the rifle in his hand like he’s contemplating hiding it behind his back.

“You’ve never taken a shot like that in your life,” she says conversationally. “Think Barnes had something to do with it?”

Steve’s shoulders slump a little. “Yeah,” he admits. “I’m not sure what’s going on up there. He says he can see what I can see through the windows now.”

“He can see what you can see? Ask him how many fingers,” Tony says immediately, holding up a V for victory.

Steve just gives him a withering look. “I can see them, what the hell is that supposed to prove?”

“Alright, Captain Cranky. I just got headbutted by a tyrannosaur, allow a genius to shake off a concussion.

“I think I can prove it,” Nat says slowly.

“What, that Tony’s concussed?”

“No, that Bucky’s consciousness is in Steve’s mind. Bucky has his trigger words, yes?”

“Yeah, unless his whaling on Cap at the airport is how super soldiers show affection.”

“Alright,” Nat says and turns to face Steve.  _ “Спутник.” _

Steve drops like a stone. Clint yelps as two hundred and twenty pounds of super soldier muscle pitches forwards into him. Tony saves him from being crushed, grabbing Steve’s arms and just about managing to turn a full plank forwards into a more sedate crumple down to the ground. They roll Steve onto his back. He’s out cold.

Clint drops to his knees, checking Steve’s pulse. The man just killed a T-Rex, there is no way that one little word can take him down. “Jesus, Nat, what did you do?”

“It’s an old code word,” she says, “designed to stop an out of control asset. Which means not only is Steve carrying the Winter Soldier around in his head, but all his trigger words too. Wonderful.”

“And his mad skills with a rifle,” Tony adds, clicking his fingers like he’s just had a lightbulb moment.

Clint blanches.“So, if someone were to say those Russian attack bot words at Cap while he’s carrying the Winter Soldier…”

Nat looks down at Steve. “We need to find Deadpool and fix this mess. I’m taking Rhodes.” She looks down on Steve in a way which would seem dispassionate to anyone who didn’t know her better. “Get him back to the tower.”

“Sure, I’ll just carry him in bridal style, I’m sure he’ll love that,” Tony shouts after her as she walks away.

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she calls back.

_ I miss you already _ , Clint thinks. “Stay safe,” is what he says, but Nat half turns and blows him a kiss anyway. He grins, rubbing unconsciously up and down his arm. See? Romantic as fuck.

“Black Widows eat their sexual partners,” Tony says offhandedly, and bends to pick Cap up. “He going to be more pissed about being carried bridal style or fireman’s lift?”

“He’ll be pissed either way.”

“Ass in the air it is,” Tony says, and hefts Cap up over his shoulders. “Alright team, I’m taking Cap and his other half back to the tower. Have fun cleaning up this mess.”

“Son of a bitch,” Clint says, watching Tony go before turning to deal with the lizard corpses that are still littered over Manhattan.

 

* * *

 

Bucky’s gradual slide out of unconsciousness is the nicest he’s had in a long time. Instead of the biting disorientation and harshness of waking up from cryo, he’s curled up comfortably on his side with his head pillowed on a strong thigh, and someone is running their fingers through his hair. It’s warm and safe and he wonders why he ever thought running from Steve would be a good idea.

“Hey,” Steve says softly. “Hey jerk, you awake?”

“Nnnfm,” Bucky replies.

“You feel like shit too, huh?”

_ No actually,  _ he kind of wants to say.  _ The headache and slight sensation of being off balance is massively weighed out by the fact I’m waking up with you.  _ Wisely, he keeps his mouth shut. Rolls over to take stock in his surroundings. Grand Central main concourse -  check. Darkness outside the windows - check. Steve looking down on him with a resigned sort of smile but still looking ridiculously attractive even at this unflattering angle -  check. Bucky can see up his nose, for chrissakes, there should be no universe in which that looks good.

They talk about what they remember, namely Nat using a word beginning with ‘S’ which neither of them dare to say aloud, a word which rendered them both completely useless, incapacitated and unconscious. Upon further discussion, they begin to understand just how entwined they are in here, how parts of their consciousness are seeping into the others.

“I gotta get out of here,” Bucky says.

Steve nods soberly. “If anyone else works out that your trigger words work on me…”

Bucky swallows hard. It doesn’t bear thinking about. “You’ll be alone again,” he says, like that non-sequitur is somehow a logical and valid piece to this argument.

“Not if you promise to stay when you wake up,” Steve offers, accompanied with Steve smile #12, the sort of shy hopeful one where he doesn’t want to be turned down but is already bracing for it. Smile #12 would have definitely been a hit with the dames, which is exactly why James Buchanan Barnes never told Steve that #12 would be a hit with the dames.

“I’ll stay,” Bucky says quietly, and smile #12 shifts into #4 - uncomplicated and happy.

Bucky immediately feels like lecturing Steve on being so goddamn trusting because he’s not JBB here, he’s the Winter Soldier and that guy has not earned smile #4 in any way shape or form. He gets as far as opening his mouth and then he hears it.

The groan of wind along ice, distant cracks that echo deep. The lights seem to go dim for a moment, pervasive cold rolling through the station.

“It’s the tunnel,” Bucky says, trying to get to his feet. Steve’s hand shoots out and grabs his wrist, which is probably not the best thing to do with the ex-Winter Soldier. Bucky tenses but manages to check the urge to take a swing with his other hand.

“Don’t,” Steve says.

“What is it?”

Steve swallows hard. “I don’t know.”

Well, Bucky is calling bullshit. “You don’t know what’s inside your own head?”

“Just leave it alone, Bucky,” Steve says more forcefully. “It’s nothing good, just leave it.”

“No.” Bucky slowly pulls back against Steve’s grip, testing out how much force Steve is really expending in order to stop him. “You’re scared of something and knowing you you’ll go your whole life trying to deal with it alone-”

Steve readjusts his grip, starting to pull back. Damn, can't get nothing past the Captain. Bucky abandons discreet and goes for trying to prise Steve’s fingers from around his wrist. 

“Let go.”

“No.” Steve throws a leg over Bucky’s, trying to pin him in place. Game on, thinks Bucky, and shoves back against Steve. The tussle is intense but brief; after a few minutes of wrestling, Bucky finds himself on the wrong end of a headlock but is saved by the fact Steve simply vanishes.

“Oh goddamn it,” Steve curses over the speakers. Bucky scrambles up and runs to the windows: He can see a ceiling. A white sterile room comes into view as Steve lifts his head. Medical. He can sense Steve’s frustration and anger at that,  _ and _ at having their conversation slash fight cut short.

Well, now Steve’s not here to physically restrain him, Bucky’s going to go gather more intel AKA nose around in Steve’s brain some more. Ignoring the ranting over the PA, Bucky takes a deep breath and heads towards the service area and the tunnel. His courage nearly fails him when he’s at the mouth of the tunnel, staring into the abyss beyond, listening to the echoing drip of water, feeling the cold wind tug at his hair. But he’s doing this for Steve, so that makes it easier to drop down onto the rusted tracks and take a step.

All of his instinct is telling him to turn back but he doesn’t. He forces himself to keep going, step after step until the mouth of the tunnel has swallowed him up, enveloping him in darkness. He knows if he looks over his shoulder he’ll see the mouth of the tunnel, the light that feels like safety and home retreating with every step. It’s only the knowledge that this is something that Steve carries around all the time that keeps him going.

Though he does wish he had a knife or a gun or five. Not that he’s expecting to fight anything in Steve’s brain but he knows the Winter Soldier flavoured part of him is comforted by having weapons nearby. Hell, facing this, even James Buchanan Barnes would feel better with some sort of defence in hand.

It gets colder, seeping through his clothes and into his bones. It hurts every time he draws in a breath, the cold snarling the inside of his lungs and snatching his breath away. It’s so dark now that he can’t see the light he left behind anymore. He’s starting to feel very, very afraid now, unable to comprehend that Steve would have anything quite so dark inside of him-

He feels it before he hears it; the juddering rumble of an engine. He braces himself, thinking it’s a train, but he quickly places the sound, dredged up out of some long forgotten memory. A  _ plane _ . The rumble and whine of an engine. The telltale scream  of protesting engines as they hurtle down towards the earth.

Echoing voices now. Pleading. Begging.

Bucky keeps walking, heart jackhammering as he hears ice groaning and cracking, voices sobbing, radios hissing and water rushing in-

And he’s out.

The tunnel opens up into a wide grey nothingness. Snow falls. The silence is deafening. It’s just a flat snow-grey plateau as far as he can see. The horizon is non-existent, the iron white of the sky blending seamlessly with the ground.

It’s the loneliest place Bucky has ever felt in his life, and he’s experienced years being brainwashed  _ and  _ in cryostasis.

“Steve?” he breathes, the word timid and immediately swallowed up by the silence. He makes himself keep moving. For a while he thinks there’s nothing here, that this vast emptiness is what has Steve so scared.

And then he spots a figure sitting on the ground, shoulders slumped and head bowed forwards. Even from this distance, he knows that figure, could recognise the breadth of the shoulders and the curve of the back from a mile off. He runs.

“Steve,” he croaks, dropping to his knees and all but sliding into him. “Steve, what are you doing here?”

Steve is so pale he’s white. His lips are blue. His eyes are dull and unfocussed, staring blankly at the falling snow.

“I’m alone,” he murmurs.

Bucky feels tears threatening. He cups Steve’s faces in his hands, trying to brush away the falling snow. “No you’re not, I’m here. Steve, it’s Bucky.”

“No, he’s dead,” Steve says vacantly. “Everyone is dead.”

“No, no, come on,” Bucky says. “Look, I’m here. I’m real. Come on, you gotta get up.”

“No point,” Steve says. “I should have just stayed in the ice.”

“Absolutely not,” Bucky says, getting up and trying to haul Steve to his feet. It’s impossible. Steve’s too heavy, deadweight and frozen.

“Everything I know is gone,” Steve says. Snowflakes catch on his eyelashes. “Everyone is gone. Everyone will go, too. I’m going to stay here. I’m too tired. I’m going to stay in the ice.”

“No, you can't!” Bucky yells, wanting to shake him or hit him. “I’m not leaving, not without you, goddammit it!”

_ “Bucky!” _

It’s the faintest of echoes, drifting through the air like a warm breeze. It’s  _ Steve _ , not this frozen image of fear in front of him, but the real Steve. He sounds panicked and Bucky will bet that Steve’ll knock himself out and come into this frozen hellhole looking for him if he doesn’t reappear in the next few minutes.

“Fuck!” he curses, letting go of the Steve in front of him. “Fuck, I can’t get you out of here unless you _help_.”

“No point,” Steve says. “Everything’ll go anyway.”

Bucky takes a step backwards, feeling like the world's worst person. Worse than he ever did as the Winter Soldier. “Fuck you, Steve,” he says, voice cracking, and then he turns away from him and runs. He runs back to the tunnel, back through the screaming and crying and all the way back to Grand Central, stopping only when he’s on the main concourse.

“Shit,” he curses, dropping to the floor and sprawling out on his back. “Steve, you need  _ so _ much therapy.”

“I told you not to go down there!” Steve sounds furious but Bucky doesn’t give a damn; he’s too happy to hear Steve’s normal voice, too relieved to be back in the regular warmth of Steve’s mind. 

  
  


* * *

 

Steve decides that he’s not got quite enough adrenaline in his life already, so goes up to sit on the roof, perching atop the giant A. Sam says he’s clearly got issues, but Sam always comes to sit with him anyway so clearly has them too. And this time he’s bought pizza, so he’s more than welcome. Bucky’s off riding trains, strangely quiet since Steve shut down their not-conversation about the depressed, lonely, scared place in his mind.

“Mind if I join you two?” Sam asks, already sitting down, swinging his feet.

“Just me,” says Steve. “Bucky’s busy poking through my head.”

“And that’s not a massive invasion of privacy at all,” Sam says, handing over the pizza box.

“I told him he could,” Steve shrugs.

“Like that doesn’t smack of desperation,” Sam says. “I bet you think that if you share everything with him, he’ll stay.”

“Oh he’ll stay alright,” Steve says. He’s pretty sure Bucky isn’t going to move more than three feet away from him now he’s seen just how pathetically scared of being alone he is.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Sorry, can’t hear you,” Steve says, taking a huge bite of ham and pineapple. “Pizza’s too loud.”

“You’re a massive jerk,” Sam tells him, just as the weight behind Steve’s eyelids shifts, an increase in pressure that tells him that Bucky’s back on the main concourse.

“Where’ve you been?”

“In a. In a cabin in a f-forest. Near a lake. Jesus, never mind me, where the fuck are you? Fuck, that’s high. Will you  _ please _ sit somewhere else? And who - who is that guy?”

“Sam.”

Sam looks up. “Hmm?”

“No, I’m introducing you to Bucky,” Steve says. “Bucky, Sam. Sam, Bucky can see you.”

“Can he see this?” Sam says, and gives Bucky the finger via Steve. “That's for my car, asshole.”

“Knock it off,” Steve says. “He wasn’t in control of himself.”

“Told you that your f-f-friends wouldn’t want me around.”

It’s half petulant and half sad and it makes Steve want to knock himself out so he can go inside his head and give Bucky a hug.

“Give him a break,” Steve says half-heartedly.

“What, is he talking shit about me?” Sam asks, indignant.

“No, I’m talking to you, give Bucky a break,” Steve says. “I don’t want you guys making things hard for him.”

“That’s what she said,” says a voice. Steve whips around, knocking his pizza off the side of the building. He can’t even spare a thought for any unlucky pedestrians below who are about to be brained by Luigi’s best deep pan, because there’s  _ Deadpool, _ sitting on the edge of a conditioning unit, legs crossed. He waggles his fingers in a  disturbingly coy little wave. “Hi boys.”

Sam and Steve respond in impressive synchronicity, lunging back onto the roof and tackling Deadpool to the floor. Steve ends up sitting on him with Deadpool’s arms twisted up behind his back. Sam is sitting across his legs and is systematically removing all the knives, guns, darts, hand grenades, nunchucks, swords, shurikens and spoons from Deadpool’s person.

“I had a dream just like this,” Deadpool says, his voice muffled partly by his mask but mostly because Steve is holding his head down against the concrete of the roof. “Though there were more rubber shoes involved.”

Bucky obviously gets an eyeful of what's going on too. “The  _ fuck _ .”

“This is Deadpool,” Steve says. “He’s the one who bought in the guy who transferred you into me.”

“Kinky,” Deadpool says cheerfully, followed by “ow, ow, ow!” as Steve presses harder on the back of his head. “If you get off me you’ll find my friend tied up over there, I bought him back to help fix the mess he made. All I ask for in return is membership of the Avengers, my own quinjet and a date with either you or Hawkeye, whoever is more likely to put out.”

Sam chokes on air. He looks like he’s half a second away from laughing, the asshole, so Steve glares at him and grits his teeth. “Jarvis, if you can hear me out here, call an Assemble.”

 

* * *

 

Deadpool doesn’t seem intimidated in the slightest by the full team standing around him and his necromancer pal, weapons drawn and pointing right at them. Thankfully, the necromancer does. He’s already blathering and promising to do everything he can to put it right.

Steve leaves the team staring them down and goes to find a quiet space to talk to Bucky.

“What do you think?” he says.

There’s a long silence. “Come in here so we can talk face to face.”

“Buck.”

“Please. We’re gonna do it, you c-c-can’t carry me around forever. And just in case it goes wrong, I wanna see you. Before my. Before my brain ends up in a potted plant or something.”

Steve tells Bucky to not joke about things like that. Bucky replies by listing all the things that he’d rather his consciousness end up in than a pot plant. Steve tells him that if he stops, he’ll go get Helen Cho to sedate him right away.

Bucky does, and so Steve ends up lying on a couch in medical, nodding as Helen talks him through the sedation procedure. He won’t have long, curse his ridiculous metabolism, but he hopes that it’s enough time for Bucky.

Once he's materialised inside his own head, Bucky tackles him with a hug that’s not unlike being hit by a truck. Steve can’t help but laugh, wrapping his arms around his waist and tipping backwards so Bucky’s feet come off the floor. Bucky yelps until Steve puts him down and then commences a pat down that the NYPD would be proud of, if procedure demanded a thorough and somewhat frantic check of someone’s face and upper body.

“I’m okay,” Steve says. “Buck, easy. I’m okay.”

“That t-t-t-tunnel,” Bucky blurts. “It was - it was awful. How do you s-stand carrying that around all the time?”

And this time, face to face, Steve can’t evade. Damn, never mind him, Bucky’s clearly the tactical genius here. His shoulders slump under Bucky’s hands.

“I don’t know,” he admits.

This time, the hug Bucky folds him into is more gentle. Steve lets himself sink into it, lets himself be close in a way that reminds him of being crammed in at Bucky’s side on a rattling subway car on the way to Coney Island.

“Please don’t end up in a pot plant,” he says into Bucky’s shoulder. What he actually means is, “please don’t leave when you’re back in your own body, I am so unbelievably scared that I’ll outlive all my friends and end up alone again and you seem to be indestructible like I am so please don’t go.”

Bucky settles his metal hand on the back of Steve’s head and murmurs, “I won’t,” like he understood what Steve was actually trying to say.

  
  


* * *

 

Steve lies back on the bed next to Bucky’s, breathing out and staring at the ceiling. He complains a lot about having to be lying down like some sort of invalid. Sam and Bucky both tell him he’s a terrible patient. For once, he doesn’t argue, though he’s tempted when Clint pulls a blanket up over him and pats it down with a grin which gives away that he knows he’s being an asshole.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Sam asks the necromancer for the tenth time.

“Mostly,” the necromancer says, and hastily changes it to a “Yes,” in the face of Sam’s incredulous stare. Flushing red, he turns to Steve. “So there’ll be light. A big flash of light. And you might feel tingling, itching, burning, twitching, stabbing pains or aching pains in your eyes, head, neck, chest, arms, legs, genitals, hands and feet.”

Sam turns the incredulous stare to Steve. “For some reason, I have a bad feeling about this.”

“I’m just covering all side effects just in case,” babbles the necromancer. “Captain, are you allergic to latex or peanuts?”

“Sam, do not let that man touch me,” Steve says, lifting his head up. Clint shoves it back down. He’s enjoying this far too much, Steve can tell.

Sam nods. “No touching, gottit. Now lie very still so we can get the Winter Soldier out of your brain without scrambling it.”

“His name is-”

He doesn't get the rest of the sentence out. There’s a blinding flash of white light, a searing pain behind his eyelids and then nothing.

 

* * *

 

Waking up without Bucky in his brain feels bizarre, like gravity suddenly doesn’t work on his head. It’s too light, the pressure behind his eyelids gone. He tries moving his fingers and toes which goes okay. He tries opening his eyes which goes less than okay; at least Clint has learned this time round and shoves a bowl at him so he doesn’t throw up on the floor.

“Thanks,” he says hoarsely, pushing Clint aside so he can see Bucky. “Bucky. Buck.”

Despite the efforts of Sam and Clint, Steve climbs out of bed and staggers over to Bucky, clutching the metal rails on the side of his bed. “Buck. Buck, wake up. Goddamnit if you’re in a plant I’m going to kill you.”

The feeble moan Bucky makes is music to Steve’s ears. He collapses back into a chair as Helen and a nurse swoop in, prodding and poking and injecting and generally fussing around Bucky. Whatever they’re doing works because within half hour Bucky is sitting up in bed, cup of coffee clutched between his hands, blinking owlishly and looking like he’s shaking off a severe concussion.

“Well t-t-that was fun let’s never do that again,” he says, and Steve laughs so hard he nearly cries.

“Not that funny,” Clint says.

“I think he’s hysterical,” Sam says.

“I’m happy,” Steve says.

“Me too,” whispers Bucky, staring down at his coffee.

There’s a pause. Steve can’t take his eyes off Bucky and he doesn’t want to, even though Bucky looks rough as all hell: hair tangled, eyes shadowed, skin sallow. Clint is staring between them like he’s waiting for something. Sam is staring at the ceiling like it can give him strength.

“Uh, can I go now?” the necromancer asks.

Sam and Clint deal with him, leaving Steve to carry on watching Bucky. Maybe he’ll quit being Captain America and become a full time Bucky watcher. Maybe they can move out to that cabin in the forest that Bucky knows he daydreams about.

“Quit staring.”

“No.”

“You’re creepin’ me out.”

“I’m just checking you’ve not got the brain of a cactus.”

Bucky gives him a withering look but it shifts to something more contemplative. More haunted. Steve still doesn’t want to look away from it.

“Definitely me in here,” Bucky mutters. He gnaws on his bottom lip and then lets go of his coffee with one hand. He reaches out like he’s going to poke a rattlesnake, all jerky and unsure. Steve decides it’s ridiculous so does his thing where he takes over, reaching out and snagging Bucky’s hand in both of his own. Bucky shudders and relaxes the moment he does, which makes Steve feel like he’s single-handedly saved the world.

“How do you feel about cabins?” he blurts out.

Bucky blinks at him. “Cabins?”

“In the forest.”

Bucky frowns. “Haunted ones?”

“No,” Steve says, “peaceful ones.”

“Like the one in-” Bucky says, and his jaw drops open and his eyes roll back. His fingers spasm in Steve’s gentle grip and then his whole body relaxes again. His eyes flutter and then open, hazy and unsure.

“Steve?” he says, a tentatively shy smile creeping across his face. He looks around the medbay. “It worked then?”

Steve’s stomach plummets. “Yeah,” he says, helpless. “Yeah Buck, it did.”

Bucky’s smile fades a little. “What’s wrong?”

Steve probably should tell him but he decides to be a coward because he can’t bring himself to be the one to give Bucky bad news. So he just pats Bucky’s hand, says he’s just relieved that Bucky’s not a plant and then goes to find Helen.

 

* * *

 

The assemble that is called later that day is a somber affair. No bickering, no yelling, no shooting arrows into the wall. Everyone keeps shooting Steve looks like they’re scared he’s going to explode. Clint’s more scared that Steve’s going to cry to be honest; he’s not sure that the team can handle it if Steve has a big emotional breakdown.

There’s a holoscreen up, showing a feed from the mebay. Barnes is sleeping, curled up on his side with a blanket pulled up high over his shoulder. He looks like a homeless veteran given a bed for the first time in forever.

“So these meetings aren’t as fun as I thought they’d be,” Deadpool whispers in his ear. Clint jerks away, trying to put some space between them. “Where’s the patriotism, where’s the justice?”

“Cap’s best friend in the world has been tortured by Nazis for the past seventy years, has got brain damage and at the last count has had four seizures,” Clint replies. “We’re all out of justice.”

“I am going to burn Hydra to the ground,” Steve says easily, like he’s saying he fancies sushi for lunch. “After I find a way to help Bucky.”

Clint looks at Tony, who looks at Sam, who looks at Bruce who rubs his forehead like he’s got a headache. Well, a headache other than the constant green one that he has.

Deadpool raises a hand. “I only know you from a few comic runs we shared, but aren’t you the kinda gal who puts your country first, Capitan?”

“Someone shut him up,” Steve bites out.

“Agreed.”

“Why is he even out of the Hulk cage?”

“It’s not a  _ cage _ , it’s a containment centre.”

“Hawkeye, please.”

Clint reaches over his shoulder for an arrow. Deadpool mimes zipping his mouth shut then blows Clint a kiss.

Tony folds his arms. “Not that I want to side with the deranged psychopath,” he says, and admirably doesn’t flinch as Steve turns his glare on him. Man, it’s like a laser of anger and disappointment. “But he has a point. That Hydra cell we found was bigger than anything we anticipated. They’re on the move, Cap, and we can’t just ask them to take a time-out while we dick around trying to fix up your pal.”

Steve stands up. “Bucky comes first.”

“Ohhh,” Deadpool says, clicking his fingers. “I get it, he’s clearly influenced by the cinematic universe. Though his characterisation was somewhat patchy in places, the undying love for Bucky Barnes is a common theme that everyone accepts on either a platonic or a romantic level-”

He doesn’t manage to say anything else because Steve simply picks up his shield and slings it full force right at him. It hits him hard enough to knock him into the wall; he slumps to the floor, groaning and clutching his chest.

“MCU heart with a 616 temper,” he gasps. “I’m in love.”

“Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky,” Steve says, ignoring Deadpool and squaring up to Tony. “I am  _ not _ giving up on him.”

“Cap, he’s got brain damage, we are not qualified to fix that,” Bruce tries.

“Helen says she can help. She can fix the damage, maybe help with the seizures.”

“But she can’t fix the trigger words,” Sam points out. “What are we gonna do, keep him locked up so no bad guys can set him off? What if they can deliver trigger words through the TV, or over a loudspeaker?”

“I don’t know, I’ll work something out.”

“You can't just fix this with force of will.”

Deadpool raises a hand again from where he’s still lying on his back nursing his probably broken ribs. “The trigger words are actually pretty easy to fix. You know, if we recycle a few ideas already used in the narrative, and we just hope the author can keep it interesting a second time around.”

Everyone rounds on Deadpool. Steve strides over to haul him to his feet. “You know how we can fix the trigger words?”

“Am I swooning? I think I’m swooning.”

“If you don’t start talking sense I’m going to get one of my friends here to  _ make you.” _

“Okay, calm down Captain Cutebutt. I was just saying, we can fix the trigger words, right here right now.”

“How?”

“No!” Sam interjects. “We are not listening to this crazy.”

“I swear on the soul of Ryan Reynolds that I know what I’m talking about,” Deadpool insists. “We just send Cap into Bucky’s brain this time around, get him to take out the trigger words.”

The response from the team ranges from outrage to skepticism and back again. Clint’s torn between thinking that Deadpool should be institutionalised and thinking maybe it’s not a bad idea. After all, Bucky did wander around in Steve’s brain so there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work a second time around.

Steve looks like he’s seriously contemplating it, even in the face of everyone else’s abject  _ no _ . He’s desperate, Clint can tell. Desperate enough to gamble on what Deadpool is saying.

“I want to do it.”

“Absolutely not.”

“There’s no guarantee that it would work!”

“It could mean keeping Bucky safe from Hydra.”

“We’ll think of something else.”

“I’m doing it and you can’t stop me.”

“Someone call Natasha, I feel like we need Natasha.”

“Team vote!” Tony yells over the arguing. “I’m calling a vote. Shut up, Cap, if this was one of us you’d weigh in and tell us it’s a team decision.”

Steve looks furious. Clint can hear his teeth grinding from where he’s standing.

Tony ignores that, too. “All in favour of letting Deadpool’s unqualified necromancer friend try and send Steve’s consciousness into the Winter Soldier’s severely damaged brain?”

Steve raises his hand. So does Deadpool. After a moment, Clint winces and raises his too.

“Okay, all who realise that this stupid idea is in fact a stupid idea?”

Tony, Sam and Bruce raise their hands.

“Hawkeye, you abject disappointment,” Tony says. “Now look what you’ve done.”

“Bucky gets a vote,” Steve says stubbornly. “Bucky is part of this.”

The meeting relocates to the medbay. It takes ten minutes to wake Bucky up and two attempts to explain the plan, seeing as the mini-fits he keeps having seem to reset his memory to an indeterminate point some minutes before. Regardless, he listens carefully both times, then glares at Steve. “Are you a maniac? Too risky. No.”

Steve storms out of the medbay and slams the door so hard that the glass shatters. 

  
  



	5. Chapter 5

Sam would probably say that Steve is sulking, though Steve can’t tell for sure because he’s locked himself in his room and is refusing to talk to anyone while playing Vera Lynn records as loud as his record player can go. It’s not exactly helping: the music clashes discordantly with the sleek modern lines of his apartment. It’s a pretty futile attempt to be nostalgic, not quite hitting the mark.

Banging on his door interrupts his not-sulking. He’s willing to bet good money that it’s Sam come to check on him, or maybe Tony come to tell him he’s not being a good team player, but unfortunately has to actually go to his door to check seeing as he disabled the digital video monitoring system that covers his rooms and the corridor just beyond. Bracing himself, he opens the door a fraction and does a double take as he spots another relic from the past. Though really, Bucky’s far from a perfect match to James Buchanan Barnes of yesteryear. Another thing from the lost years that doesn’t quite fit.

“The hell are you doing out of medical?!” Steve yanks the door open, spots Clint just beyond Bucky, leaning against the wall and chewing on a red vine.

“What?” Clint rolls his eyes the way he always does when he says Steve is pulling Kermit-face. “I’d’ve caught him if he fell down, what more do you want.”

“I’m in withdrawal,” Bucky scowls, pushing into the apartment. “I’ve b-been in your head for days then you cut me out and leave me high and dry, I’m g-g-getting the shakes over here. You’re. You. You’re a bastard, Rogers, leaving your best pal to go cold turkey, I coulda g-got real sick here.”

Steve has to laugh. He’s been mourning Bucky for so long that he’s ended up idolising him a little, thinking only of all his best parts and the good times. Ergo, he’s somehow forgotten Bucky’s superhuman capacity for spouting utter bullshit.

“You are not in withdrawal.”

“What, you a d-d-d-doctor?” Bucky says and makes himself comfortable on Steve’s couch. “There. My headache’s going already.”

“You _are_ my headache,” Steve says, but his tone and the way he’s tucking a blanket over Bucky’s shoulders means it comes out more fond than annoyed.

“Mmmm,” Bucky hums, looking like a pleased cat. Steve absently reaches out to stroke a hand over his hair, wondering if he’ll purr. “Come sit down, sweetheart. Missed your dumb face.”

Steve sits. Clint kicks the door shut and makes himself at home in Steve’s armchair, hunting around for the TV remote. Funny how Steve’s never entertained in his apartment before, and now he’s got two friends here in one go.

“You should be in medical.”

Bucky clicks his fingers, faking a puzzled frown. Ugh, _so_ much bullshit. “Th-things B-B-Bucky B-Barnes used to say to Steve when he was small and sick. No? Things Bucky Bar-Barnes used to say to Steve when he’d been shot by Nazis. I know! Things B-Bucky B-Bar-Bar. Shit. Things Bucky _Barnes_ is saying to Steve who basically just had brain surgery.”

Clint snaps a red vine, the end hanging between his teeth. “Bro, Bucky Barnes is a rough name to have when you’ve got a stammer.”

Steve kicks out at Clint, offended on Bucky’s behalf. Bucky just nods though and heaves out a sigh, tipping sideways into Steve like the effort of saying his own name has worn him out completely.

“Thought you were mad at me,” he mumbles.

Steve considers that. “I am.”

Bucky shakes his head. “Not risking you. I’m p-past saving.”

“You are worth more to me than anything else in the damn world,” Steve snaps, shoving Bucky off his shoulder so he can stand up. Christ, if Bucky keeps talking like that, Steve will punch him and he’s not about to start hitting veterans with brain damage. “And I _want_ to save you. More than I want to be Captain America, more than I want anything! I know the risk, but sitting here and not trying is _killing me._ ”

After he’s finished yelling, he becomes very aware of Clint staring between him and Bucky like he’s just had a goddamn revelation. Bucky is staring at him like he’s afraid all over again.

“I’ve been b-back barely a week,” Bucky says. “I’ve done awful things. F-f-fucked up things.”

Steve crouches down in front of him, resting his hands on Bucky’s knees. “I don’t care,” he says gently, and Bucky starts to cry. Steve folds him up in as gentle a hug as he can manage. Behind him, Clint says something about needing to feed his arrows and scarpers.

Bucky goes lax and then jerks under Steve’s hands. Steve eases back, tips Bucky’s chin up to meet hazy eyes. “Where’d I lose you?”

Bucky frowns, searching through his memories. It quickly turns into confused comprehension, edged with a slight blush. “Uh, you were saying...you said you would rather save me than be Captain America.”

“Damn straight,” Steve says with a wan smile. “And you better not forget that, pal.”

 

* * *

 

Clint is dreaming about shooting arrows into a giant inflatable bear that just _won’t go down_ when he’s rudely awakened by someone rapping their knuckles on his forehead. “Glllrk,” he manages, arms and legs tangled in bedding. “I’m an Avenger, don’t arrest me.”

His torturer sits him up, passes him his hearing aids then a pair of sweatpants. Able to hear and no longer naked, Clint squints up to see Steve standing there, radiating impatience.

“Oh god,” Clint says, shivering. He’s so tired he could _die._  “Get out of my room, what are you doing.”

“I need your help,” Steve says, and grimaces as Clint perks up.

“Captain America needs help? My help? Wow, this makes a change from him bossing us around and barking out commands-”

He stops as Steve catches his jaw in his hand, fingertips pressing in hard. “I am off duty and Steve Rogers will not hesitate to kick your ass.”

Clint shoots him a thumbs up and thankfully Steve lets go. What Steve wants help with soon becomes apparent as they walk first to the HECL to collect Deadpool and the necromancer, then head back to Steve’s rooms. Bucky is sitting on the couch, blanket pulled up around his shoulders. His whole body seems to relax, leaning towards Steve like he’s a flower and Steve is the sun, strengthening Clint’s earlier realisation that maybe this is less heterosexual than he previously assumed.

“Slumber party,” Deadpool says happily. “Can I share a bunk with Hawkeye?”

Steve shoves him into a chair. “Clint, on him,” he says and Clint makes an acceptable amount of noise about Steve not being the boss of him, and then does exactly what Steve wants. Deadpool doesn’t seem phased, just reaches out to gently stroke the tip of the nocked arrow in a motion as disturbing as it is inappropriate.

“You,” Steve says to the necromancer. “My consciousness into Bucky’s brain. I’m going to go in and get rid of the trigger words.”

“B-but only if you can do it with-with-without hurting him,” Bucky says, talking to the necromancer but with his eyes fixed on Steve. Yep, Clint decides. With the yelling and the declarations and the way Bucky keeps looking at Steve: not completely heterosexual at all.

The necromancer nods, though he doesn’t look sure. He looks around to Deadpool, brows knitting.

“You got this,” Deadpool says, uncharacteristically serious. “You did it once, you can do it again. This is great, offering our services in the name of love. Let’s get these two stud muffins comfortable.”

After a brief argument about relocating to medical, Steve and Bucky end up on Steve’s bed, lying back side by side on the neatly tucked sheets. Remarkably, Deadpool doesn’t make any jokes, just stands on Steve’s side of the bed looking down on him. “Okay, it might not look like a train station in there,” he says. “You’ll have to work out the system to find your way around. Me and Hawkeye will be here the whole time to make sure nothing happens to your amazingly sexy, somehow steroid-free body. Right, Hawkeye?”

Clint shrugs. “Yeah, what he said.”

Steve blows out a breath. “Thanks,” he says, turns his head to look at Bucky. “Ready?”

Bucky pauses. He seems to be wrestling with something, his nerves or conscience not resting easy. “Whatever you f-find in there, just… Just don't judge too harsh okay?”

“I told you, it wasn't you-”

Bucky shakes his head. “Not Winter Soldier stuff,” he mutters. “Just my stuff. Please, just promise you won't think too bad of me.”

“Buck, it's okay-”

“ _Promise._ I said I'd stay so you g-gotta stick it out and give. Give me a chance.”

Steve eases him down, hastily jumping in even though he's really not looking happy about it. “Alright, alright. I promise.”

Bucky nods, swallows hard. Steve reaches out for his hand, holding it between both of his own. “We’ll be okay,” Steve says, and Bucky turns his head to look at him, tentative and unsure. Goddamn, there goes the Winter Soldier’s rep as an emotionless killer. “Me and you, till the end of the line, right?”

Bucky’s face does something that looks like a smile. “End of the f-f-fuckin’ line,” he echoes. “You dirty cheat, usin’ that on me.”

Steve grins. Somehow, even with everything that's going on, it’s the happiest Clint has ever seen him. “It’s true, I mean it.”

Bucky reaches out, touches the tip of a metal finger to the dimple in Steve’s cheek caused by the grin. “Me too.”

“My heart just came,” Deadpool whispers, wiping away an imaginary tear. “Okay buddy, time to do your thing.”

The necromancer rolls up his sleeves. “Want me to go through the side effects?”

“Not necessary,” Steve says. “Just do it.”

The necromancer raises his hands and Clint sees a shock of white light, feels a blinding pain in his temples and then nothing.

 

* * *

 

 

Well, Deadpool wasn’t wrong when he said that it might not be a train station. As far as Steve can tell, he’s in the lobby of a run down tenement block. Though run down is maybe putting it nicely: all the windows are boarded up and the lobby is only lit by a single lightbulb, hanging like a noose and humming like it’s about to give out at any moment; the walls are peeling, dirty flecks of paint littering the bare floorboards beneath; the stairway is dark and there appears to be a gaping hole about six steps up. The whole place feels off too: a strange pressure in the air like a brewing thunderstorm, something heavy and dangerous not too far away.

It's not pleasant. But it feels weirdly like home.

“Oh holy fuck.”

Steve jumps a mile, and then lets rip with his own bout of cursing as Clint appears, sitting up over by the rotting mail boxes that line the far wall.

“What the _hell_ are you doing here?!”

“I don’t know!”

Steve’s brain does some rapid calculations and some rapid cursing and quickly works out that the necromancer has fucked up _again._  He rubs his forehead like he can rub away one of his many headaches. “Well, you’re here now, until they get you out.”

“My body is unattended and in the company of Deadpool!” Clint yells back.

“Stop yelling in Bucky’s brain!”

“How do we even know this is Bucky’s brain? Because if it is, I’m telling you that your buddy has got issues!”

“We know he’s got issues, what were you expecting? The goddamn Ritz?” Steve turns his back on Clint and starts looking around. “Now shut up and be helpful. We need to make sure this is definitely Bucky’s mind-” he sees Clint gearing up to argue so raises his voice to add, “-and not someone else’s, like Deadpool’s.”

Clint shuts his mouth with an audible clack. “Okay,” he says. “What do we do?”

Steve turns his attention to the ceilings. No speakers, no PA system. A second survey of the room brings something else to his attention: a battered payphone over by the mailboxes. He strides over, checks it for any suspicious devices and then picks it up.

“Bucky?”

There’s a crackle and a hiss and then-

“Goddamnit what the fuck, son of a whore that hurt, someone g-give me a fuckin’ gun, imma shoot something, oh hell, ow, ow, ow-”

“Bucky!”

Clint arrives at his side, trying to hustle in and listen. Steve-in-this-century is not completely comfortable with people being in his personal space so plants a hand on Clint’s forehead and shoves him back.

(Sam says he’s probably subconsciously rejecting comfort because he categorises it as a betrayal to those friends he lost or left behind. Steve says Sam needs to stop playing therapist. Sam says he’ll stop when Steve gives in and gives Tony Stark the hug he’s clearly been angling for since their first team-up in New York.)

“Motherfucker, _ouch._ ”

Steve grips the receiver so hard that it creaks warningly. “Buck, it’s me! Are you okay?”

“I feel like someone just t-tried to fuck my face through my eyeball,” Bucky replies and Steve cringes, sending a silent apology and plea for forgiveness up to Bucky’s ma.

“Are you awake?”

“Yeah I’m awake, someone bet-bet-better get me some goddamn morphine-”

Bucky’s voice abruptly cuts out. Steve’s heart leaps and he looks around, expecting Bucky to materialise in the lobby.

He doesn’t.

“Fuck,” Steve mutters, giving the phone one last try before hanging it up. Clint is watching him expectantly rather than belligerently, so Steve explains his assessment of the situation and his potential options for what to do next.

Clint chews at his lip, thoughtful. “So we wait by the phone for Bucky to reconnect or appear, or we go through the scary ass apartment building looking for trigger words, in whatever form they may be.”

Steve nods, waits. Clint’s expression goes surprised. “Oh, you’re asking me for an opinion?”

Steve sighs. Maybe the team would benefit from him not being such a hardass all the time. Though in his defence, he doesn’t mean to be a hardass, it just kind of happens.

“Yes, Hawkeye. I’m asking for your opinion.”

Clint nods. “Okay then. Let’s go looking. Waiting around is boring.”

Which is exactly what Steve knew he’d say but he’ll take it, seeing as it’s what he wants as well. Bucky may be the nosey fucker out of the pair of them but there’s no denying that Steve’s a teensy but curious about what may be in Bucky’s apartment block brain.

They avoid the stairs, take one of the lower corridors. Steve wishes he had his shield. By the way Clint’s fingers keep twitching, it looks like he’s missing his bow too.

The corridor is just as dilapidated as the lobby, though on the walls are pictures that are incongruently bright and clean. One is a landscape with rolling green hills and brilliant blue water. Austria, Steve seems to think. Another is two young boys, sitting side by side on the sidewalk in Brooklyn, sweating and complaining about the heat. Even though it’s a still picture, Steve knows the boys are sweating and complaining about the heat because the boys are him and Bucky.

“Reckon these pictures are memories?” Clint asks, examining a picture of a gang of soldiers in PT gear playing baseball.

“Yeah,” Steve says, heart aching.

“Whoa,” Clint says, stopping at another picture. “Cap.”

Steve walks over. The heartache intensifies as he finds himself looking at a picture of a body lying slumped over on a bench, a bullethole in their head. Well, he never expected all of Bucky’s memories to be good, but seeing something like that so vividly is awful.

“This can’t be it,” he says aloud. “All my memories were like films, like real moments…”

He trails off, eyes fixing on the number 012 hanging crookedly from the closest apartment door. Bucky said he had to get on and off the trains to access Steve’s memories. He had to go through doors.

“Cap?”

“I think…” he says, reaching for the door handle. “Damn. I can’t ask him for permission.”

“He gave you permission to be in here,” Clint reminds him. “Do it.”

Steve does. He twists the handle, pushes the door open and steps in. He finds himself in a snow smothered ravine, amongst the frozen pine trees. To his abject horror, he finds he recognises this place. He knows it without even having to look up at the tracks cut into the side of the mountain face, hundreds of feet above him.

“Cap,” Clint says, quiet. He’s still in the doorway, one foot in the corridor.

Steve turns and his chest seizes up like he’s having a heart attack, pure agony as he spots Bucky. He’s lying there on the snow-covered rock, remaining limbs bent at unnatural angles. There’s a pool of blood beneath him, seeping into the ground beneath, staining the snow scarlet.

“No,” Steve chokes, running over. He slides onto his knees, tries to reach for Bucky. His hands slide through him like he’s not even real.

“Cap, come on,” Clint says roughly. “You don’t need to see this.”

Steve stifles a sob, pressing his hand to his mouth. He doesn’t think he can feel any worse but then he notices the barely-there rise and fall of Bucky’s chest. He’s _alive_ , and Steve both hates and loves it because Bucky’s in pain and has got more coming his way, but surviving the fall means that he’s here with Steve.

He pushes himself to his feet, feeling his stomach roiling. Walks away and pushes past Clint, who shuts the door behind them.

There’s a moment of awful silence. Clint shuffles uncomfortably, sneakers dragging on the threadbare carpet. “They’re not all that bad, right?”

Steve wipes his eyes on his sleeve. “God, I hope not. Oh, _Buck_.”

Clint shuffles some more. “You really care about him don’t you?”

And Steve’s ma would clip him round the ear for lying, so Steve avoids Clint’s eyes and quietly says. “Yeah. More than anyone, I think.”

“We’ll fix him,” Clint says, fiercely supportive in that way he sometimes is when he’s not back talking or giving Steve a hard time for being in charge. “Come on, we can keep going.”

They leave room 012 behind, trying number 011 instead. This time when they open it they’re hit with a riot of noise: laughter and swing music and glasses clinking, voices chattering and feet on the dance floor.

Steve wanders in like he’s in a trance, sliding through the crowd like a ghost. It’s their old local dance hall, the one with the awful hooch behind the bar and the flirtatious cloakroom attendant. For some reason, there’s no smell to the memory, no sweet drinks or sweat or cigarettes.

“There,” Clint says, pointing. Bucky is over by the stage, his arm slung around a girl’s waist, his other hand wrapped around a beer bottle.

“I’m just sayin,” he shouts over the music. “You gotta tell Nancy that she’ll have a good time!”

“I don’t know, Bucky,” the girl says, smiling fondly. “She don’t like bein’ set up.”

“Should make an exception for Steve,” Bucky nods vigorously. He’s drunk and happy and Steve wishes so badly to be back here for real, to be standing there at his side. “Steve’s the best, Steve’s a real gentleman. Heart of gold. Good face, too.”

“Is he talking about you?” Clint asks.

“Yeah,” Steve sighs. “He’s overselling me, as usual.”

The girl laughs, leans back against Bucky’s arm so they both sway. “Maybe I should be on a date with your pal Steve instead.”

“Oh no way, guy’s an asshole,” Bucky promptly says, grinning like the damn Cheshire Cat. The girl laughs and Bucky leans in to kiss her.

“Well, I’m glad he remembers some of the good times,” Steve says, turning away to leave.

“Why aren’t you here? I thought you two were _inseparable_.”

Steve scowls at the back of Clint’s head. Clint knows he hates it when they quote his Smithsonian audio-tour at him. “I was probably busy bein’ sick or pickin’ a fight somewhere.”

Clint snorts, pushing their door back open. “You know the more time you spend with Barnes the more you sound like _auuughohholyfuuuuuck-”_

Clint steps back out into the corridor and lets out an unholy scream as he discovers that the floor is no longer there. He frantically flails and tries to right himself; Steve acts on instinct and lunges for him, grabbing his wrist just as Clint tumbles over the edge.

He lands hard on his front, shoulders hanging into space, heartbeat hammering and fingers clenched so tightly that he’s probably broken Clint’s wrist.

“What the fuck?! Why is the fucking floor gone?!” Clint howls, looking down at the inky blackness beneath him.

“I don’t know!” Steve braces himself in the doorway and hauls Clint back up. Clint scrambles back up, crawling across Steve’s back and into the dance hall.

“Nope. No, no, no. I’m staying here forever.”

Steve scans the area. The void stretches from their doorway across to the opposite wall, but is only a few feet wide. The floorboards are intact outside rooms 012 and 010; it’s just their dumb luck that it’s right outside this door. He climbs to his feet and simply jumps across, landing safely on the floorboards further down the corridor.

“Nope,” Clint repeats. “Hard pass.”

Steve holds out a hand. “ _Clint_.”

“Oh, fine.”

Clint screws up his face, takes a breath and leaps. The door slams shut behind him as he lands. He shoves away Steve’s hand and glares at the ground.

“Why the fuck is Barnes’ brain making spontaneous black holes?!”

Even as Clint says it, Steve realises what it must be. “Brain damage,” he says quietly. “Bucky’s mind is damaged. He keeps having…”

He can’t say it out loud. It’s too real when he does.

“Oh,” Clint says, understanding. He pulls a face that speaks volumes about how uncomfortable he is. “What happens if we fall in one of these?”

Steve sighs. “Let’s not find out, huh?”

 

* * *

 

Bucky slowly wakes up again, feeling like he’s just been through a round of electroshock. His limbs are still like wet spaghetti and his stomach still feels like it’s trying to digest his own liver. And that’s got nothing on the migraine currently pounding against the inside of his skull. He feels like there’s enough pressure in his head to pop out both his eyeballs.

Though on the plus side, he’s awake again and this time he’s going to _stay_ awake, at least for long enough to ascertain whether everything went according to plan or not. He knows Steve is up in his brain but he doesn’t know why he’s only been able to talk to him through darkness. Steve literally appeared in his own brain whenever he was asleep or unconscious, so why isn’t Bucky getting the same deal?

Some days, it feels like life is being very unfair.

“Bucky? Mister Winter Soldier sir?” the blurry outline of Deadpool reaches over and waves in front of Bucky’s eyes. “Okay don’t panic. You’ve got two consciousnesses inside your brain. Wiggle your fingers if you’re not scrambled egg up there. Well, more scrambled than you were. Wiggle your fingers if you’re still at Hydra brainwashing scrambled but not brain through a blender scrambled.”

Bucky does his best, manages to get his fingers twitching.

“Oh thank our Lord and Saviour, Hugh Jackman. You’re okay. Good. See, I like to think we’ve bonded, Steve and I, yet I feel he wouldn’t hesitate to dismember me if we’d broken you.”

Bucky swallows and manages to croak. “Two consciousnesses?”

“Yeah, Hawkeye got caught in the blast radius. He's up there too.”

“No, I spoke to Steve, he d-didn’t say, I only spoke to him.”

“Well either Clint is up there too or he’s…” Deadpool flaps a hand around, probably indicating that Clint could be _anywhere_.

Bucky struggles to sit up. When the room stops swimming he sees Steve conked out next to him and Clint passed out on the floor near the foot of the bed. Deadpool is sitting cross legged on the bed, elbows on his knees and hands cupping his chin.

“You want a sponge bath?

“I want you to get the d-doctor and get them to check Steve and Clint,” Bucky rasps. He can distantly hear voices, echoing inside his brain. “And I want a goddamn cigarette.”

“Those things’ll kill you,” Deadpool says, rolling backwards off the bed and onto his feet. “Alright sweet cheeks, one doctor coming up. Sit tight and don’t go anywhere.”

Bucky's not sure he’s got the strength to stand, so he slumps back against his pillows and closes his eyes. The last thought he has before he passes out again is that he hopes that wherever he is, that Steve is okay.

 

* * *

 

Everything in Bucky’s brain is going more or less to plan, despite the decor and general structural integrity of the building leaving a lot to be desired. They’re starting to systematically search room to room, trying to find anything that could possibly help them in trying to fix the issue of the trigger words.

They manage to search two rooms - a relatively innocuous memory of 1937 Bucky filling out paperwork in his Pa’s accounting office, and a memory of Winter Soldier Bucky watching a blonde woman through a sniper scope - before things go decidedly not to plan. It starts with a slight rumble in the distance, then the light buzzes and flickers violently. Steve throws out an arm to stop Clint, trying to pinpoint where the sound is coming from.

Then, with a noise like a vacuum vanishing into a garbage disposal, a black crack appears in the floorboards in front of them. A crack which widens with shocking speed, the floorboards splintering as they’re pulled down into the growing blackness beneath.

“Run!” Steve shoves Clint ahead of him and they start running, hearing the creaking and groaning of floorboards behind them, cracking as they disintegrate into nothingness. They sprint to the end of the corridor, Steve slamming shoulder first into the wall. Clint is already on the staircase but Steve chances a glance backwards and sees that firstly, the hole has stopped growing and secondly, _Bucky is there,_ standing on the other side of the gap.

“Bucky!”

“What?” Clint yells back from the landing above.

“Steve,” Bucky says, then looks down at the chasm in front of him. “Fuck. My brain is a shithole.”

“Bucky’s here!” Steve yells, and sprints back the way he came, halting on the edge of the void. Oh god, Bucky’s so close but too far away and Steve is thinking he’ll probably risk falling into the void if there’s even the slightest possibility that he can get to Bucky.

Something must show on his face because Bucky’s expression goes alarmed. “Steve, no.”

“I’ve jumped further before.”

“Steve, no.”

“Remember the factory in Austria?”

“The one with the explosions and t-torture and the man - the man peeling off his own face? Yeah, I remember _that._ ”

“Yeah, that. You remember when I jumped from the bridge? That was further.”

Bucky starts backing up out of the way, even as he’s adamantly repeating, “Steve, no.”

Steve hears Clint approaching behind him. “You could jump that,” he says, peering over Steve’s shoulder.

“Don’t encourage him, you asshole!” Bucky yells.

“I could jump that,” Steve says to Clint, even as Bucky carries on yelling.

Clint nods. “You could totally jump that.”

“I’m going to jump that.”

“Do it for the vine,” Clint says, which Steve doesn’t understand but he doesn’t have the time to care. He backs up a reasonable four or five paces, fixes his gaze on Bucky, who by this point has both hands clamped over his eyes, and goes for it.

He sprints. He leaps. He lands. Right in front of Bucky, who grabs him, hauls him away from the edge and then smacks him around the back of the head before wrapping him up in a hug.

“Ow,” Steve complains, rubbing the back of his head with one hand and pulling Bucky close with the other. “Do you not believe in me or something?”

“I believe in your stupidity and your invulnerability c-c-c-complex,” Bucky says, voice muffled in Steve’s shoulder. He thumps him between the shoulder blades. “You are going to kill me with stress. First the T-Rex and now - now the brain-damage void.”

“I’m okay,” Steve says, grinning despite himself. “We’re okay.”

“What, so you guys are just gonna leave me here?” Clint calls out, sounding pissed. “Sure, great. I’ll just carry on with the mission while you two have a romantic reunion.”

“Shut up, Hawkeye,” Steve says, and pulls back enough to see Bucky’s face. He manages a relieved smile then twists around to gesture at the chasm behind them. “So, if you could persuade Helen to start trying to fix the brain damage, that’d be swell.”

Bucky nods. “The trigger words?”

“No progress there, yet,” Steve admits. “We’ve just been...poking around.”

Bucky goes very tense in Steve’s arms. “You...you said you wouldn’t judge me on what you find.”

Steve frowns, pushes back. Bucky won’t look at him. “We really doing this again? I’ve already seen enough of your handiwork,” he says. “And I don’t blame you for it.”

“Sure,” Bucky says, evasive. He looks around. “I d-didn’t think I’d actually get to be in here. Thought I’d be stuck just. Just. Just hearing you. Kinda wish I was. It’s fuckin’ awful in here.”

“Yeah, not the nicest,” Steve concedes. “New coat of paint, replace a few floorboards, it’ll be good as new.”

Bucky doesn’t look convinced. Steve gently shakes him, hands on his shoulders. “Buck. It’ll be fine.”

Bucky opens his mouth to reply but before he can utter a sound he’s gone, vanishing into thin air and leaving Steve holding onto nothing.

“Damn,” Steve curses. “Come on. The sooner we get these damn trigger words sorted the sooner we get can out of here.”

“Sure, I’ll just jump across the death void and join you,” Clint says with a roll of his eyes that’s so over the top that Steve can practically hear it. “Then we can find the trigger words that we don’t know what they look like and then just get rid of them even though we’re both unarmed and have no idea what we’re doing.”

Steve turns back to Clint, backs up and prepares to take another running jump. “The depth of your helpfulness astounds me,” he says flatly, and leaps.

 

* * *

 

After searching for what could be anywhere between minutes and days - time is a tricky concept in here - Steve and Clint haven’t find any indication of trigger words. They do find six memories of Brooklyn, three memories of being in Paris during the war, two memories of Bucky with his younger sisters and nine of Bucky committing murders that rank from cold-blooded all the way up to deeply disturbing.

They’ve also come across two more voids in the ground, one jumpable and one definitely not, even by Steve’s standards. Steve makes the call to go around; the hole in the staircase that he’d spotted when they first arrived is gone, so they head up to the second floor.

Steve’s still thinking about Bucky’s fear that they’re going to judge him for any of this. He’s actually getting pretty irritated with Bucky’s constant fussing about it; anything he did as the Winter Soldier is clearly the fault of Hydra.

Luckily - and kind of unexpectedly - for him, it turns out that Clint thinks the same. It’s probably to do with the fact that Clint also has an extensive criminal past and knows all about the issues of responsibility and redemption. And while the whole abandonment issues and emotional manipulation and abuse and gaslighting that Clint went through isn’t as brutal as Bucky’s electrocution and _literal_ brainwashing, its easy to see why Clint is parking himself in Bucky’s corner.

Steve finds himself deciding that he’d happily go hand to hand with everyone who hurt Clint as well as anyone who dared lay a finger on Bucky. Not that he’s going to say it out loud, because Clint would only roll his eyes or get spitting mad and insist he doesn’t need any pity or help from anyone, least of all Steve.

“Right. 201,” Clint says as they come up to the first room on the second floor. “Please don’t be another decapitation. Please don’t be another decapitation.”

“I’d rather it be that than another memory of torture,” Steve says frankly, and pushes the door open. Thankfully there’s no blood or electric shock equipment or syringes in sight. What there is is a worn out church, filled with people in their Sunday best, listening to the priest as he lectures from the front.

“Religion,” Clint says with distaste.

“Shush. Mind your mouth,” Steve says, scanning the crowd. He finds his Ma first and his heart leaps, then spots Bucky’s Ma and Pa next to her. Which means that he and Bucky are probably nearby.

“Oh my god, is that you?” Clint exclaims. Of course he’s managed to find Steve first. “You’re tiny!”

“Well, I’m only ten,” Steve says, mouth twitching as he goes closer. He and Bucky are sat side by side, heads bent together, whispering furiously. Of course, Steve looks minuscule next to Bucky’s already-starting-to-grow-up form. Steve could easily be mistaken for a six or seven year old.

“But then where did the dinosaurs go?” Small Bucky is asking Small Steve, expression determined. “If God made everything and he put it all on the Earth, why did the dinosaurs go?”

“Uh, maybe there was another thing, like with the ark,” Steve ventures, picking at a loose thread on the side of his pants.

“No but see dinosaurs were so big,” Bucky insists. “Like a house.”

Steve’s ten year old brow creases. “Yeah exactly. They’d be too big to fit.”

”You couldn’t just leave them behind,” Bucky whispers, sounding enraged. “And they have like fossils and stuff, so dinosaurs were made at different times, not all in one go.”

Steve’s eyes go wide. He smothers a cough with his sleeve. “You think the bible got it wrong?”

Bucky goes to reply but winces as his Pa reaches over and gives him a warning tug on one ear. He waits until the hand retreats and then nods at Steve.

“You think the dinosaurs went to heaven or hell?” Steve whispers, and Bucky starts giggling manically, which is of course when the priest loudly asks the young masters Barnes and Rogers what exactly is so funny about his sermon on Cleansing of the Temple, and Steve gets a real clip around the ear from his Ma. They have to stand at the back of the church in silence for the rest of the service, getting the stink eye from the priest the whole time. Bucky is beet red and staring at the floor. Steve looks less bothered, staring at a painting on the wall.

“You’ve been a troublemaker since you were tiny,” Clint says, looking thrilled.

“In my defence, Bucky started it,” Steve shrugs. “He was obsessed with science. The natural world when we were kids, then physics and space when he got older.”

“So you’re telling me that the Winter Soldier is in fact a giant nerd?” Clint asks.

“Bucky Barnes is a complete nerd,” Steve corrects absently. “Come on, let's go.”

They leave the church memory behind. Steve’s got no desire to stay there but he’s glad Bucky has that memory. It’s a good one.

 

* * *

 

When the team find out what Bucky and Steve - and by proxy, Clint - have done, they are collectively furious. There is yelling. There are threats. Luckily, the anger seems directed at Steve who isn’t conscious to listen to any of it.

“I cannot believe him. We had a vote!”

“He’s _such_ an asshole.”

“He didn’t even tell us.”

“We had a _vote._ ”

“He thinks he can do everything on his own.”

“He’s got no concept of self preservation.”

“He has _no_ respect for the vote.”

Bucky listens for a while, trying not to get distracted by the indistinct echoing voices inside his own head. He can only make out the odd word, but he guesses it’s Steve and Clint. He’s been trying his darnest but he can’t seem to speak to them, not like he and Steve could chatter away. He guesses he’s got his broken brain to thank for that.

Soon enough, when the team realise how frustrating it is to lecture Steve when he’s unconscious, the anger gets directed at Bucky.

“You said no,” Stark says, accusing.

“Why did you let him do it?” the Widow asks.

“What happened?” Rhodes asks.

“Did he bully you into saying yes?” The Falcon asks.

“Will you all s-s-stop?” Bucky says, surprising himself with how forceful it comes out. “We. We talked about it. It was mine and Steve’s decision. I can’t. I can’t do any good in this world until those t-t-triggers are gone. And he wanted to help. And he won’t be any good to anyone else until he’s done that.” Suddenly he feels very awkward and has to look away. “He, uh. Said it was important to him. To help me.”

The looks go from annoyed and suspicious to more accepting and resigned. They turn away from Bucky and make official sounding decisions, which ends with Steve and Clint being relocated to medical. Once they’re all hooked up to their various monitors and wires and tubes, Bucky sits down at Steve’s bedside, exhausted and worried.

Before long, he’s joined by Stark, who walks in with Steve’s shield, sitting it in one of the plastic visitors chairs next to the bed. He glances over at Bucky.

“Just checking you're not going to try and murder him. You know, again.”

Bucky doesn’t bother to dignify with that with a response. He’s of sound mind, so he would _never_. Though his track record is a little iffy so he understands why Steve’s friends are cautious.

He sighs. “I’m glad he’s got friends to look out for him.”

Stark rears back. “We’re not friends, we’re colleagues. He signs off all our team paperwork, we can’t afford to lose him.”

“You kiddin’ me right now?”

“Look, we work together but…Cap’s a closed book. It’s like he never thawed out all the way. Have you ever tried to befriend someone who’s spent seventy years encased in ice? Not easy.”

“I imagine it’s not easy because of the massive emotional trauma associated with spending seventy years frozen in ice.”

Stark shrugs again. “I didn’t freeze him, that’s not on me. Look, we maybe consider him a part of our...team, family, whatever it is happening here. I guess I would count his star spangled ass as a friend but there’s only so much we can do when he’s...suffering under massive emotional trauma from spending seventy years in ice.” He stops, sighs. “Don’t tell him I said any of this. I’ll deny everything. I’ll sue you for defamation of character. I’ve got lawyers and I’m not afraid to use them.”

Bucky snorts. “You’re s-so full of shit.”

Stark drops into the chair one along from Bucky, leaving Steve’s shield in between them. He pulls out his phone, tapping away like he’s not remotely interested in Bucky or Steve.

“Tell me if you manage to make contact,” he says, tapping his head with a finger but not looking up. “Would be good to hear from him.”

“So you can rest easy knowing you won’t have to sign your own paperwork.”

“Something like that,” Stark says vaguely, and with that they both settle in silently to watch and wait.

 

* * *

 

The memory of the dinosaur-church-fiasco of 1927 is followed by two more memories of long range sniper shots. Steve can tell by the look on Clint’s face that he’s unwillingly impressed and wonders how the team would function with two long range experts. They’re either going to get on like a house on fire or hate each other’s guts.

He stows the thoughts as they open another door, this time stepping into a hallway not dissimilar from the one they left, albeit in a much better state. This one, however, is full of angry shouting and the tension is palpable. Steve recognises the Irish lilt of his mother a fraction before he pinpoints Bucky’s Brooklyn drawl.

“-sending for a goddamn priest!”

“James, he’s sick. What the hell was I supposed to do? We can’t risk-”

“He's not going to die! You hear me? Tell Father Callahan that he can stick his last rites where the sun don’t shine!”

Clint looks at Steve. “Are they arguing about you? That’s your Mom, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, a little taken aback. “I musta been sick.”

What stuns him is not the fact that he’s apparently sick enough for his Ma to have sent for Father Callahan, it’s that Bucky is _shouting at his Ma._ Full on red-faced, arm-waving _yelling_. Even though Bucky’s a clear foot taller than her, she looks like she’s ten seconds away from taking him by the ear and-

Oh okay. So maybe ten seconds was too generous, because she’s just stepped forwards, grabbed Bucky by the ear and yanked him down towards her so she can speak directly into it. Bucky chokes but does stop yelling, staggering as he tries to regain his balance.

“That's my boy in there,” she says, voice low and mean and it makes Steve cringe, reflexively responding to the anger and disappointment in her tone. “And I know he means a lot to you. But you do not get to come up here and tell me what to do.”

“You’re giving up on him,” Bucky says, and bites back a curse as more pressure is applied to his ear.

“Don’t you dare,” Steve’s Ma hisses. “Don’t you _ever_ say I’m giving up on him. And don’t you dare come into my fecking home and belittle the work of our Lord. I should wash your mouth out, James Buchanan.”

She lets him go. Steve can barely breathe, he’s so awed and terrified and desperate to know how this plays out. Next to him, Clint seems in the same boat. His mouth is hanging open even as he nudges Steve with an elbow.

“Your Mom just said fuck.”

“She’s Irish, of course she did.”

Memory Bucky is staring down at the floor, eyes looking too bright. “I don’t know what to do,” he says thickly.

“Well, anything other than yelling at me and taking the Lord’s name in vain,” Steve’s Ma says, and then reaches out and takes Bucky’s hands. She squeezes them and his face just crumples. She’s got him pulled down into a hug within half a second, his face buried in her shoulder. As she strokes a hand over the back of his hair, her own eyes fill with tears.

Steve could cry too. He wants to be there with them both more than he wants to _breathe._

Remarkably, Clint doesn’t say anything. He just takes Steve’s elbow and tries to guide him towards the door. Steve jerks his arm away and strides out, jaw clenched so tight that he can feel his teeth grinding. He waits for Clint to offer some useless platitudes, to say he knows how he feels, to try and connect like everyone’s been doing since he woke up out of  the ice. What Clint actually does is say, “Wow.”

Steve frowns. “What?”

“Bucky’s the bravest motherfucker on this planet, that proves it. No way would I risk bawling out my dying friend’s Irish Catholic Brooklyn Mom.”

And Steve feels his tension recede like water down a drain. He huffs out a laugh. “Neither would I,” he says, rubbing at his face. “I have no idea how he had the balls to stand there and yell at her. I backtalked her once when I was thirteen and I thought she was going to skin me alive.”

Clint nods. “I’d rather yell at the Hulk.”

“I’d rather yell at the president.”

“You already did that.”

“I did not yell.”

“Okay, you already spoke in loud and annoyed tones to the president.”

“I wasn’t annoyed.”

“Sure you weren’t.” Clint claps him on the shoulder and heads for the next door.

There’s the briefest moment in which Steve hesitates, feeling maybe a little emotionally stressed. He just wasn’t expecting _his_ life to appear in so many of Bucky’s memories. _Inseparable_ , a smirking voice in his head says, and he wishes Bucky were still in there so he could blame it on him.

“Cap?”

Clint’s questioning tone kicks Steve into gear. No way is he having Hawkeye think he needs to take charge and start giving out orders. With that in mind, he steels himself and marches to the next door. Nothing can be more emotionally stressful than seeing his Ma and best pal have a heart-rending breakdown because he’s dying, right?

On the other side of door 222 is a street, a quiet suburban street lined by trees, leaves fluttering in an spring breeze. There’s a buick special parked on the street, music playing from an open window.

“What’s this?” Clint asks. “This is olden day times, Cap.”

“I figured that much,” Steve replies. He feels on edge. He can usually pinpoint or categorise Bucky’s memories pretty quickly but he’s uncertain as to where this suburban landscape fits in.

Instinct has him walking down the street, looking for any sight or sound of Bucky, but then he spots something: a 1936 Harley Davidson knucklehead, parked up on the driveway of one of the houses. Its paint is gleaming blue, exactly the same shade as it had been in the picture that Steve’d once admired in a magazine.

“This isn’t a memory,” Steve says. “I always dreamed of owning one of those.”

“What, the motorbike? Then why is it in Bucky’s head and not yours?” Clint says. “It probably is a memory, just someone else owned it.”

Steve’s not convinced but he doesn’t bother trying to argue. He just walks up the path past the bike and into the house. There’s two pairs of boots by the front door, coats nestled together on a rack. It smells like warmth and freshly brewed coffee, and it’s so painfully domestic that Steve wonders whether he is actually in Bucky’s brain at all, and then he immediately feels like a massive tool for doubting. Bucky isn’t all murder and death, no matter how much Winter Soldier he’s got in him.

The doubt vanishes when he pushes open the door to the master bedroom to find Bucky in the bed. It’s swiftly replaced by shock because Bucky’s not alone in the bed.

“What the _hell?_ What is this?!”

Oh shit. In his moment of utter dumbfounded stupefication, Steve had forgotten all about Clint. Well, too late now.

Steve stares helplessly at the bed, at the soft morning light that spills gently over the white covers. “Not a memory. It’s...” he trails off, trying to find _any_ word other than ‘fantasy’. “It's a dream.”

“He dreams of being in bed with you,” Clint says carefully, eyes like saucers. “Yeah, I don’t know why I ever assumed there was a heterosexual explanation for you two.”

“We’re not like that,” Steve says, though he can’t tear his eyes away as dream-Bucky yawns and lifts a hand from beneath the covers, gently running his fingers through the closely cropped hair by Steve’s ear. Dream-Steve hums happily and wriggles closer, murmuring something quiet. Dream Bucky laughs softly and they both settle again, Bucky drifting his very human fingertips down Steve’s neck and across his shoulder.

“Steve. Please tell me you’re not missing how gay this is.”

“I can see that,” Steve snaps, wrong-footed and uncertain. He turns and walks away, shoving Clint out of the room too. He strides down the path, past the bike and out of the memory, back onto the corridor. He feels somewhere between adrenaline-thrilled and sick, a little like when he jumps out of a jet without a parachute, but he doesn’t think anyone can blame him seeing as the foundation of ninety years of friendship has just been completely skewed on its axis.

Bucky dreams of them in bed together. Of them living together. Making a life together in the suburbs with an actual literal white picket fence.

How the _hell_ has he managed to miss this?

“Cap?” Clint asks. “Uh, you don’t look so good.”

“It was never like that,” Steve bursts out. “We never…”

“Cuddled? Canoodled? Spooned? Spent a lazy morning getting handsy in bed?”

“Stop,” Steve says forcefully. “We’re done talking about it.”

Clint’s brows go up but he shuts his mouth, miming zipping his lips together. With another loud eye roll he opens the next door along, and promptly lets out a strangled shriek.

“Oh holy fuck!”

Steve is there in an instant, already expecting death and torture and unspeakable horrors. What he sees is another bed, once again occupied by him and Bucky, though this time they’re not exactly cuddling. Fuck, he didn’t even know he could spread his legs that far.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” Clint is chanting, eyes glued on the tangle of limbs in front of him. “I will never unsee this, never.”

“Stop watching!” Steve yelps, loud enough to be heard over the moaning and the slick sounds and the bedframe creaking. “Clint!”

He tries to grab Clint but the bastard dances out of the way, cocking his head to the side as he carries on watching. “Well goddamn, Cap,” he says, sounding impressed. “Is that thing accurately sized or has he scaled it up for the sake of the spank bank?”

“You are the worst friend ever,” Steve says. His face feels so hot that he thinks he might burst into flame. Resolutely not looking at anything - not Bucky’s tongue peeking out from his half-open mouth, not his own heaving chest, not the way Bucky’s toes have curled in pleasure - he grabs Clint in a headlock and wrestles him out of the room.

“Do you have to manhandle me when I’ve just seen you naked?” Clint says, wriggling out of Steve’s grip. “Oh man, I’m never going to be able to take you seriously again.”

Steve bristles. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay-”

“I meant because I’ve seen you naked, not because you were naked with another guy!” Clint shouts. “You could have been banging anyone in there and I would still be asking for more brain bleach than there is in the world! I want to erase the memory of your dick from my head, not the fact you’re gay!”

“I’m not gay,” Steve insists.

“Well Bucky clearly isn’t straight,” Clint shoots back. “Did you not know he’s clearly got a thing for you?”

“No!” Steve shouts, then stops, wrong footed. “No,” he repeats, uncertain. “I didn’t, he never said…”

Clint literally facepalms, dragging his hand down before letting it drop. “I can’t even,” he begins. “Ugh. Outstanding.”

“You got something to say, you better fuckin’ say it now,” Steve snaps, ready to get riled up all over again.

“Just - you never knew he had feelings for you?” Clint demands. “I’ve been watching you two for like a week and I already know you’re some Brokeback Mountain level shit!”

“I don’t even know what that means!” Steve bellows back. “Will you just drop it?!”

He takes a step towards Clint to underscore his point. Sam says that Steve needs to be careful because he doesn’t realise how intimidating he is now he’s all tall, but Steve _does_ know exactly how intimidating he is now he’s tall and he’ll use it to his advantage if necessary. It’s lucky that right now he’s decided the moment calls for it, because as he takes his violent step forwards there’s a crack and a bullet hole appears in the wall exactly where he’d been standing.

He and Clint both automatically duck away, both raising hands to grab at absent shields and arrows. Steve turns, pushing Clint back, and his heart plummets as he spots a very familiar figure standing at the end of the corridor, wearing black Kevlar plus mask and muzzle, with a gun pointed right at them.

He’s under no illusion here about who would win this fight: unarmed Captain America and Hawkeye, or the Winter Soldier who is weaponized and has an unfortunate home field advantage.

“Run!”

He and Clint run for their lives. Steve can hear bootsteps following them and he really doesn’t want to find out what’ll happen if he gets shot while in Bucky’s brain. A half step ahead of him, Clint skids to a halt, grabbing hold of a door and yanking it open; they both tumble through and slam it behind them. Steve shoves his weight against it and braces himself for either the Winter Soldier trying to batter it down or shoot through it, but neither happens.

He counts to twenty, then another twenty for good measure, then steps slowly away from the door.

Another couple of minutes pass and no size nines or bullets attempt to get through the door, so Steve relaxes marginally. A brief glance about shows that they’re in the belly of what looks like a cargo plane. Bucky is sat in a lone chair in the centre of the bay, arms restrained in a pair of huge forearm cuffs. Steve sighs. He’s intimately acquainted with those types of forearm cuffs and knows how heavy and uncomfortable they are.

“You think he can get in?” Clint says, still staring at the door.

“I think if he wanted to come in then there wouldn’t be a lot we could do about it.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s comforting,” Clint says, so sarcastic it hurts. He wanders over, crouches down in front of memory-Bucky, peering at his face. Steve comes over too, and Clint shoots him a concerned look. “He looks drugged. His pupils are huge.”

“He probably is,” Steve says, jaw jumping as he looks down on Bucky’s unnaturally still and vacant form. “I’m going to kill everyone who ever associated with Hydra.”

“So you’ve said,” Clint says. “I get it. But we’ve got bigger problems right now.”

He stands up and they stand shoulder to shoulder, arms folded as they look at the door that leads back to the corridor. The corridor which now showcased two different things that could kill them. Steve thinks he’d rather take a bullet than fall down a black hole. After all, he’s got plenty of prior experience at being shot. And a lot of _that_ is prior experience of being shot by The Winter Soldier.

“Reckon he’s still to be out there?” Clint says.

“I have no idea,” Steve says.

“You’re gonna have to fight him again if he is.”

Steve nods. “Yeah. I know.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check and mate joke adapted from Parks and Recreation. Mostly everything else inspired by comics and the MCU and re-imagined by my tyre-fire of a brain.

“So…” Clint says, arms folded, fingers tapping restlessly at his elbow. “I think we should go back out there.”

Steve ignores him, also standing with his arms folded, though unlike Clint who is facing the door head on, Steve has his side to it. Mostly because even though there’s a murderous assassin outside who he’s certainly not going to put his back to, it feels kind of rude to turn his back to the Bucky that’s inside the room with them. True, he’s a memory who has no awareness of Steve and Clint, but still. It’s the principle.

“Just rattle the handle,” Clint says. “See what happens. Or stick your hand out. Your fingers’ll grow back if they get shot off, right?”

“I feel like I’ve had to say this way too many times. I’m a super-soldier, not a lizard.”

Clint looks briefly baffled. “Lizards can grow their fingers back?”

Steve grits his teeth. He just wants five minutes to _think_. He needs to get on with the mission to save Bucky, which means dealing with the part of Bucky that possibly doesn’t want saving. Getting rid of the trigger words is as good as decommissioning the Winter Soldier and Steve knows how he’d react if anyone tried to suddenly tell him he couldn’t do what he was literally made to do.

“Oh, fuck this,” Clint mutters, then looks up at the ceiling. “NAT!” he yells. “Get me out of here! Nat! Helen! Can anyone hear me?!”

“Christ, stop yelling in Bucky’s brain!” Steve snaps. “It’s enough of a fuckin’ headache carrying someone around in your brain without that someone yellin’ all the live long day!”

“Well what else can we do? Either go out and face the freaking Winter Soldier without any weapons, or sit here until they get Deadpool and his crazy ass friend to get us out!”

Steve can’t deny he’s tempted by option two. Option two means no going back out there to look through memories and fantasies, no risk of seeing more of Bucky’s feelings for him. Every time he glances at the memory Bucky out of the corner of his eye he feels his face go hot, stomach swooping.

Though option two means leaving Bucky’s brain and facing Bucky and talking to him about...whatever this is. Steve cannot express how much he doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s only just got Bucky back and Bucky has agreed to stay and now it’s all going to _change_. The idea of change like that makes that lonely cold place in his mind seem way too close for comfort.

He rubs his face, decides he’s going to suck it up and carry on with the mission. No matter what’s going to happen between him and Bucky - no matter if he ends up alone again - Bucky deserves to be able to live his life.

Steve swallows hard. Suddenly facing the Winter Soldier doesn’t seem all that scary.

He casts one glance back at the still, shackled form behind him and then heads for the door. Clint immediately makes a lot of alarmed sounds but Steve’s barely listening. He has a feeling that this is the sort of thing that Sam would say is “unnecessarily reckless,” but he abruptly finds he doesn’t give a damn.

He yanks the door open and finds nothing.

“You’re crazy,” Clint says, trying to shove past him onto the landing. “Sam was right.”

“What, you rather I threw you out first?” Steve asks, looking left and right as he edges out into the corridor after Clint.

“Well, he’s gone,” Clint states the obvious, then spins on his heel and looks at Steve like he’s about to start some shit. “So. Are we gonna talk about what we saw back there?”

Ugh. Starting shit it is then. Steve goes for the tried and tested method of deliberately misunderstanding, hoping it’s enough to throw Clint off. “He was drugged, you were right.”

“No, not there, back in the other rooms. 223. The one with the...bed. Let’s go with bed.”

Bucky’s brain obviously is on Steve’s side some of the time, because before he can snap back at Clint, they hear an awful familiar creaking and the light above their head gutters. Steve shouts out a warning; he runs left and Clint runs right and they end up standing on either side of a chasm that’s easily twenty feet across, nearly the length of the entire corridor. Too far to jump without a runup.

The dust settles, the destruction stops. Steve tries not to think about any potential seizures which would correlate to such a big void appearing in Bucky’s mind.

“So, that happened,” Clint yells. “What do we do?”

“Keep going,” Steve says and yeah, Clint might be the one called Hawkeye but Steve can see him rolling his eyes even from here. “You head back to the stairwell, I’ll sweep the rest of this floor. Meet in the lobby in an hour.”

“There’s no sense of time in here!”

“Okay, meet in the lobby after ten rooms,” Steve amends. “And if you see the Winter Soldier, run. Don’t engage.”

“Maybe tell yourself that? You’re literally the only one who would even try that without being suited up.”

“I can take him.”

“Cap,” Clint says, sounding exasperated, then pauses. “Please? Don’t fight him. Don’t engage.”

Steve’s a little taken aback and annoyed at the insinuation that he couldn’t take the Soldier, but then it clicks and he’s embarrassed that he didn't realise that Clint isn’t being an asshole or argumentative, but just showing concern for a teammate. Maybe Steve does give the rest of the Avengers a hard time. They’re trying.

“Okay,” he concedes. “I won’t. Not unless it’s a fight or die situation.”

“Well obviously,” Clint says, then sloppily salutes. “See you in ten rooms, Cap.”

He disappears around the corner at the end of the corridor. Steve watches him go then turns on his heel to carry on the search. The first door he comes to looks like all the others, yet it takes him a hell of a lot of courage and internal pep-talks before he’s able to reach for the handle. He keeps thinking that it could be more - more _fantasies_ of Bucky’s and it makes him feel sick and nervous and something else all at the same time.

“Come on Rogers,” he mutters. “You fought Nazis, you can deal with this.”

The door reveals a memory of Bucky playing baseball with some of his unit, probably before he even left the States for the war. Steve nearly falls down with relief. Emboldened by the lack of snuggling and or dicks, he keeps going. He finds two more memories of Bucky working with the 107th, one of Bucky playing with his little sister when she was a baby, one of the Winter Soldier lying on his stomach on a rooftop, looking away from his sniper-scope and reaching out his fingers towards a stray cat that’s edging closer.  

He leaves that one smiling. And then wonders why his brain keeps going back to thinking about room 223.

 _‘Bucky has...a crush on you,’_ he thinks. ‘ _That’s it. Just a crush. He’s obviously some degree of queer and likes your superman body. That’s it.’_

He checks one more room. Finds Bucky standing in his Winter Soldier gear, holding a guy by the throat. The Winter Soldier is demanding to know where someone is, voice halting and stammering. When he doesn’t get the answer he wants, Bucky lifts the guy up so his toes are skittering helplessly over the floor. The guy is insisting he doesn’t know, right until the point where the Soldier pulls a knife out with his free hand and holds it against the guy's ribcage. Steve doesn’t have any personal taste or appreciation for torture, which is why he prefers to let his associates deal with information extraction, so is about to turn and leave when he hears his name.

“Cap-Captain Rogers is in New York,” the guy rasps.

Bucky bares his teeth, pressing the knife in harder. “I kn-know,” he hisses. “What is Hydra plan. Plan. _Planning_.”

“Kidnap,” the guy gasps, and Bucky’s face goes dark.

Oh, Steve thinks. He knows this - Bucky said he’d found out that Hydra were going to hit Steve but he’d never explained how or why. He’s caught between awe and fear at the look on Bucky’s face - his murder stare going even more murderous at the insinuation that Hydra are going to dare lay a finger on Steve.  

 _Just a crush,_ he tells himself as he leaves the room. _Bucky just has a crush on you. He disemboweled that Hydra guy because he’s your friend and he wants to protect you. And you find people you know attractive. It’s just the same._

God, he’s grateful that Bucky isn’t in his head anymore, because these are thoughts that he really doesn’t want anyone listening in on.

He goes to the next room. Stares at the door for a good minute and a half.

Then he about turns and heads back the way he came. The void is gone, so he can walk right up to 223, fingers reaching out towards the handle, bracing himself to see himself in a very compromising slash flexible position again. He glances sideways and feels something tug inside his ribcage. Without thinking, he drops the handle and instead walks into room 222.

Leaning back against the bedroom wall with his arms folded, he watches himself and Bucky lazily stretch and shift closer together under the covers. He looks at the content smile on Bucky’s face, hears this version of himself breathe gentle words against the soft skin in the dip between Bucky’s collarbones. He watches as Bucky’s fingers stroke over the short hair on Steve’s nape, understands why Bucky is yearning for that sort of closeness.

“Aw, shit,” he sighs, rubbing forlornly at his forehead. “This ain’t a crush.”

He’s seen everything he needs to see. Which doesn’t explain why he ends up sitting on the corner of the goddamn bed, watching the sweep of Bucky’s eyelashes, watching how his mouth curves up when he’s kissed.

Kissed by Steve. By _him._  That’s _his_ mouth touching Bucky’s, all gentle and sweet.

He should stop watching. Really. This is private.

He kind of wants to lie down and have Bucky touch his hair like that for real.

Okay, he’s leaving.

He wonders how nice and warm it is under those blankets, pressed up all against Bucky like that.

Leaving. Any moment now.

Remembering that he’s left Clint searching through Bucky’s brain is the only thing that gets Steve up again. He doesn't really understand himself here, doesn’t get why he’s so obsessed with what he’s seeing. Surely if he were feeling morbidly curious - and like a bit of a pervert - he would have gone back to the sex-den-room. What is it about this stupid house and stupid bedroom and stupid kissing that’s got him all turned inside out?

Okay. Maybe Clint was right - not that he’s ever going to say that out loud where people can hear him. Maybe he _was_ missing just how gay this all is - and he’s not just thinking about Bucky.

Feeling a strange welcome-unwelcome spike of panic and anxiety roll through him, he decides that he’s going to ignore it and have his crisis of identity and sexuality a little later. Not because he’s scared, but because he knows he has to get back on mission. He’s so preoccupied with having his crisis later than he doesn’t see the Winter Soldier standing right outside the goddamn door until there’s a knife embedded in the hand that he threw up reflexively to cover his face.

“Son of a bitch!”

The Winter Soldier has the nerve to yank the knife free and try to stab Steve again. Feeling understandably pissed off, Steve decides he’s had enough and punches the Winter Soldier right in the face. The mask comes free, clattering to the ground, and Steve’s momentarily thrown by seeing Bucky’s face, seeing that mouth that Bucky dreams of using to kiss Steve. Unfortunately the lapse in concentration gives the Winter Soldier another opening, driving his knife down into the meat of Steve’s shoulder.

Steve gasps in pain and shock, grabbing the Soldier’s wrist so he can't retrieve the knife again, reckoning it’s better embedded in his shoulder than being used to skewer his organs. “You asshole,” he grits out, forcing the Soldier’s wrists back. The Soldier bares his teeth at him like some sort of feral dog, twisting around to try and get free for more stabbing.

“Submit,” the soldier hisses. “You will not win.”

“Like fuck I won’t,” Steve snaps, ducking and twisting - ow, ow, ow, fucking ow his shoulder hurts - to yank the Soldier’s arm up behind his back, trying to force him down onto his knees. “Goddamnit Bucky, you’re being a real dick here!”

“I am not Bucky,” the Soldier snaps back. He twists free and kicks Steve hard in the knee. Yep, _asshole._

“No, Bucky wouldn’t be such a _dick!_ ”

The Soldier scowls, like he’s offended. He swings at Steve, aiming for a sucker-punch that Steve barely manages to deflect with his forearm. Shit, this is like DC all over again except now he knows who he’s fighting and there are no Helicarriers or government agencies to get blown up. This time, the worst collateral seems to be the copious amounts of blood they’re getting on the threadbare carpet.

“ты проиграешь.”

“Shut up,” Steve snaps back, landing a punch on the Soldier’s sternum which sends him staggering back into the wall. He follows up with a knee to the solar plexus, smashing the Soldier hard enough to make his head snap back, leaving a dent in the dry wall. “I don’t know - any - Russian!”

“You will lose,” the Soldier helpfully repeats, lunging back for Steve. In a manoeuvre that Clint would definitely call a dick move, the Soldier punches Steve’s shoulder where the knife is embedded, then grabs his hand, digging his thumb right into the stab wound. It punches the breath from Steve’s lungs and all he manages is a strangled “ _motherfucker_ ,” before a metal arm is closing around his neck. Steve gets his not-stabbed hand up just in time to stop his trachea being crushed by a metal bicep. He grabs the Soldier’s wrist with the stabbed hand to try and pull it free, leaving bloody smears all over the metal, but the Soldier has strength, leverage and not being stabbed on his side-

_“Оставь его!”_

Steve and the Soldier freeze, mid-grapple. Steve cranes his neck up, blinking blood out of his eyes and sees Bucky, striding down the corridor looking bizarrely like a parent who has just found two siblings scrapping.

“P-put him _down,_ ” Bucky snaps again, pointing a finger at the Winter Soldier, and to Steve’s utter shock, he does. “Get b-back,” Bucky says sternly. “Sit down, for - for Chrissakes. _Sit_.”

The Soldier drops down to sit with his back against the wall, staring balefully up at Bucky. Bucky narrows his eyes and does the universal sign for ‘I’m watching you,’ two fingers pointed at his eyes, flicked around to aim at the Soldier who just stares back, scowl deepening. 

Steve straightens up, hand holding his shoulder next to the knife, looking at Bucky with his mouth hanging open.

Bucky looks from the Soldier to Steve, then rears back, oddly defensive. “What? You think he’s been - been in my brain for seventy years and I d-d-don’t know how to deal with it?”

“You just told the Winter Soldier to sit.”

“I _am_ the. The Winter Soldier,” Bucky says, running a hand through his hair, pushing it back. “I mean. Look, he’s part of m-m-me. Like that f-frozen depressed you was a part of you, yeah? He just - he - I just have to work at keeping a lid on him. I can do it as long as no-one’s shouting tr-trigger words at me.”

“Huh,” Steve says. “I guess.”

“I know,” Bucky says, and steps closer. “Jeez, I got you g-g-good.”

He carefully runs a hand over Steve’s collarbone, inspecting the knife wound. It’s really starting to hurt now, a dull annoyed throbbing as his body tries to heal but finds it can't because of the blade still stuck in him. Steve hisses in pain and Bucky makes a mildly sympathetic face before yanking the knife out in one swift tug. Steve yelps and tries to shove Bucky away. Bucky just rolls his eyes and tugs his shirt off, wadding it up and clamping it to Steve’s shoulder.

“You asshole.”

“Stop being such a b-b-baby.”

“You’re _both_ assholes.”

“Yeah, you w-wonder where he gets it from,” Bucky says. “Serum amplifies everything remember? Including your st- stupid fight me attitude. He had a knife, Steve, what were you thinking?”

“He started it!” Steve exclaims, and turns to glare at the Soldier. “He was just there when I came out of-”

He stops abruptly, not wanting to say, “the room where me and you have a house with a white picket fence and we snuggle up in bed because you dream about us being in love.” The moment they talk about it, everything’s going to change.

Bucky doesn’t notice. He just gets Steve to hold onto the wadded up shirt and then examines the stab wound in his hand, hissing in sympathy. “He’s. He’s a bit like a rabid dog,” he muses. “Senses fear.”

Steve looks between Bucky and the soldier. “But...that’s you.”

“Yeah, I’m learning to live with it,” he shrugs and then looks back to the door. “Saw something. Some. Something that scared you, huh?”

Steve can't lie to Bucky. He _can’t_ , even though he wants to. “Um…”

“That’s p-p-probably why he popped up,” Bucky says. “Toldja, we can sense fear.”

“Uh," Steve says. Bucky’s very close, still holding Steve’s injured hand in both of his. “I think I found what you didn’t want me to judge you for. “

Bucky freezes, going pale. Behind them, the Soldier perks up, lifting his head from his arms. “No,” Steve says to him, throwing out a hand. “ _Stay._ ” The soldier scowls and looks pointedly at Bucky, as if to say “look how scared he is. This is what I get off on and you’re stopping me, you dick.”

“Buck,” Steve says helplessly.

Bucky swallows hard. He won’t meet Steve’s eyes. “I never - I never woulda said anythin’,” he says. “I know - I know what I want ain’t n-necessarily what you want. But...I. I. I figured I might as well use what I feel for g-good. I can't love you out - out in the open so I’ll do it in the privacy of my own head and just - I’ll just - I’ll just follow you, p-protect you and look after you.” He huffs, soft, sad and resigned. “Figured I could use that love with-without you ever having to know.”

Steve feels his eyes going warm. He’s seen a lot of stuff in his lifetime. Quite a lot of awful stuff. A little bit of good stuff. Very few wonderful things. But he thinks that Bucky’s stammering, halting speech is the purest, most genuinely _good_ thing he’s ever heard. Even the Winter Soldier is looking less hate-filled as he watches Bucky struggling to get his point across.

He reaches for Bucky, pulling him into a one armed hug. He’d do two, but his stabbed shoulder is aching something fierce. He presses his nose into the hair above Bucky’s ear, throat tight and insides all wobbly. Bucky’s still all tense though, like he could snap in two at any moment.

“Buck,” he says. “You know that’s exactly the same for me. I’m stickin’ with you to the end of the line, pal.”

Bucky presses a hand against Steve’s sternum and pushes him back. His eyes are red. “N-n-not the same.”

 _I think it might be,_ Steve wants to say. Probably should say. “I never stopped missing you,” he says. “Since I woke up - I just. Nothing’s not the same.”

“I know it’s n-n-not the same but that’s different,” Bucky says. He sighs, glances over at the Winter Soldier, who is still sitting obediently by the wall, watching the back and forth like he’s only mildly interested in it. “Come on, we better go.”

Steve reaches out to catch Bucky’s wrist. “Buck, I don’t want this to change anything-”

“It won’t,” Bucky says, still not looking at him. “N-never has, has it? You,” he says, addressing the Winter Soldier. “You gonna behave?”

“Buck-”

“So I found the - holy shit!” Clint reappears, making everyone jump. Steve whips around, Bucky raises his fist ready to punch and the Winter Soldier dives for the knife that Bucky had pulled out of Steve’s shoulder.

“Clint, calm down. Bucky, chill out. You, _sit_.” Steve takes control again because no-one else will, pinning all three of them with a look that dares them to disagree. “Clint, it’s okay.”

“That’s the Winter Soldier and he’s holding a knife!”

“Yes, but he does what Bucky says.”

“And you, apparently.

“Yeah well he’s - he’s part of me. I listen to Steve, ergo he d-does too,” Bucky says sounding tired.

“What? You never listen to me.”

“I do, I just give you a hard t-time.”

“By not listening to me.”

“Only when - only when you’re being dumb-”

Steve goes to retort but before he can, Bucky vanishes. Shit, Steve hates not getting the last word in and Bucky’s got an unfair advantage seeing as he can just disappear into thin air.

“Well if you two could’ve stopped flirting for ten seconds,” Clint says loudly. Behind them, the Winter Soldier snorts with what could be either derision or amusement. “I could’ve told you both that I found the trigger words.”

“What?!” Steve says, then quickly checks in with the Soldier. No murderous reaction to the mention of trigger words, that’s a positive. He turns back to Clint. “Why didn't you say anything?”

“I was trying to, and then I saw you had company, and then you started arguing like an old married couple!”

Steve’s getting a headache. He’s been stabbed twice and punched more times than he cares to admit, and now he and Bucky are - well. They’re not how they used to be. Today officially sucks. On a scale from being shot at by German artillery to crashing a plane in the arctic and being frozen for seventy years, it’s a solid eight.

“Okay,” he says, consciously putting ‘sitting down and crying’ on the bottom of his options list. “Soldier,” he says, waiting for the Soldier to meet his eyes. He takes a breath and gambles. “We are going to go and remove the trigger words so no-one can force you to do anything, okay?”

There’s a moment of perfect stillness in which Steve thinks crap, he’s going to work out this means basically rendering him obsolete, he’s going to strangle me, but then the Soldier just gives one short jerky nod. “да. Yes.”

Steve nods back. Well, if the Soldier just decides to object at any point he’ll deal with it. Being stabbed three times in a day is probably not all that different to being stabbed twice. He replenishes blood quickly, it’ll be fine.

“Okay. Clint, lead the way. Soldier - follow me and no stabbing anyone this time around, gottit?”   

 

* * *

 

Bucky sits with his head in his hands, feeling the steady throb behind his temples. It’s like a migraine that never quite crests, just sits there with Bucky’s head in its jaws, slowly but surely pressing down. He’s in Steve’s rooms, sitting on the sofa. Tony Stark had turned up not long ago, demanding to know why he wasn’t sitting at Steve’s bedside any more. Bucky had replied by using his metal hand to push Tony out of the room by his face. He’s been left alone since.   

He wants a drink. He wants to sleep. He wants….he doesn’t know. At this point, running away seems like a real option, though he concedes there’s little point seeing as he’d just end up taking Steve with him. And Hawkeye of course, but Hawkeye’s not the one that Bucky’s been nursing a secret love for. A secret love that’s actually not so secret anymore - more awkward and unrequited than secret.

Concentrating on the pressure in his head as hard as he can without making stabbing pains shoot through both eyeballs, he tries once again to see if Steve can hear his thoughts. “Steve?”

Nothing. Maybe because he can’t properly communicate to the interlopers in his brain. Maybe because Steve doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore.

“Steve? Steve.” He swallows hard, feeling his voice crack. “Steve, p-please don’t hate me.”

There’s no reply.

He wipes his face on his back of his hand. Makes his mind up. Goes up to where Deadpool is sitting in a chair beside Clint’s bed, knitting what looks like a bright purple, adult-sized onesie. He looks around as Bucky walks in, setting his knitting down across Clint’s knees with a flourish.

“What’s up, Buttercup?” he says. “You look sad. Is it the decades of torture and murder or something else?”

“Somethin’ else,” Bucky mutters. “Get your friend. We need to get Steve and Bar-Barton out of my head.”

“They done with the trigger word rubbing out?” Deadpool asks, then nods to Clint’s prone form and says, “That’s what she said.”

“No. But it’s time,” Bucky says. “It’s d-dangerous in there.”

“I sense there’s a more complex reason under that sullen, brooding exterior,” Deadpool says. “But I’m all into consent and choice. And if you want the stud muffins out of your brain, then out they come.”

“We can’t risk them any longer,” Bucky says. “Not for me.”

Deadpool nods. “This is definitely the part of the story where we have a whole bunch of misunderstandings, we were about ready for that. Hashtag mutual pining.”

He holds up his hand for a high five. Bucky just stares at him.

“No? Okay, no. Come on then, Bucks Bunny, let’s get you oiled up and laid down. Metaphorically, of course. Stop looking so worried. You sit down and I’ll fetch Mister Necromancer and we’ll get Cap and the sensual archer back into their own bodies quicker than you can say penultimate chapter.”

 

* * *

 

It takes Steve, Clint and the Soldier a long while to get going. Mostly because Clint wants to lead the way but doesn’t want the WInter Soldier behind him. After a lot of negotiating and some firm commands - to Clint and the Soldier both - Steve finds himself in the centre of the procession: The Soldier leads while Clint calls instructions from the rear. They end up going down into the basement, through a vent and into some sort of subterranean service area. The walls are edged with thick pipes and electric wiring and the concrete blocks between are covered in Cyrillic script.

“Oh wow,” Steve says, and then as the Soldier shimmies through the vent, he lunges across and grapples him into a headlock, covering his eyes with his palm. “Stop,” he commands. “Stop struggling. You can’t read any of this, it could trigger you. _Stop._ ”

The soldier stops fighting, holding his hands up. “протокол неясен. Готовы к заказам.”

“ _English._ ”

“Protocol unclear. Ready for orders.”

“Close your eyes. Cover them with your hands. There you go,” Steve says, guiding the Soldier to stand still with his hands clamped over his eyes. It’s slightly disconcerting to see him so biddable, but he guesses it beats the alternative. “Clint, do not read anything out loud.”  

“I’m not an idiot,” Clint says. “Besides, I can’t read Russian.” 

“You’re in love with Nat, of course you can read Russian,” Steve says and waits it out while Clint makes the completely predictable outrage-denial-guilt-oops you got me faces.

"How dare you, I am outraged," Clint says, pointing at Steve. "I have never - I don't even _know_ love - how do I know _you're_ not in love with Nat, hmm? Ever thought about that? You just totally dropped yourself in it, check and _mate._ "

Steve raises one eyebrow.

Clint huffs explosively, throws his hands up and says, “Fine, you win, I know Russian.” He scowls at the  words. “They’re complete nonsense. They’re so random. Like someone threw Russian Alphaghetti at the walls.”

“Well that’s the point,” Steve says. “You don’t want casual conversation to set this guy off.”

“Speaking of setting this guy off, is he gonna let us do this?”

“I hope so,” Steve says, looking at the Soldier and feeling a stab of pity. “Only one way to find out.”

He walks up to the closest wall, peers closely at the writing. It looks painted on, layers and layers built up over time. Steve hesitates, then scratches at it with his fingernail. The paint flakes off, crumbling under his touch.

“Clint, get me his knife. Find anything you can to scrape this shit off.”

He holds out his hand for the knife but even as he does, there’s a flash of searing white light, pain, and then everything goes black.


	7. Chapter 7

Clint wakes with a gasp, sputtering and choking and flailing his arms around. He doesn’t know where he is, when it is, which way up he is or what the _hell_ just happened.

“He’s awake!”

“Clint’s awake, we’ve got Clint back.”

“Vitals are good.”

“Is his brain mush?”

“Clint, can you hear me?”

“Someone wave a slice of pepperoni under his nose.”

He tries to get his limbs cooperating, lifting his hands up. He feels fingers catch his and almost melts with relief; he’d recognise those fingers anywhere. Hell, those fingers have patched him up, dragged him to safety and touched his elbow-heart on more occasions than he can count.

“Nat,” he croaks. “Are you in brainses Barnes or am I back?”

He hears a soft laugh. From somewhere, there’s another shout and then all the bodies around his bed move away, hustling and rushing.

“Wha?”

“Shh,” Natasha says. “Steve’s waking up, they’re checking on him.”

“Check on him,” Clint says. He tries to open his eyes but the light seems to have a vendetta against his retinas so he screws them shut again. “He got stabbed, check on him.”

“He’s fine, physically he’s fine. Whatever happened in there hasn’t affected him out here.”

Clint tries to sit up and feels nausea swimming in pretty much his entire body. Christ, no wonder Steve threw up on his feet when he woke up last time. Clint really doesn't want to throw up because a) he hates being sick, and b) if he doesn't that means he's more metal than Cap.

“идиот,” Natasha says firmly, and even though he doesn’t officially know Russian, Clint can honestly say he has never been happier to be called an idiot. “Don’t be causing trouble now,” she says, and then Clint feels lips gently pressing against his forehead. He makes a sound that he’s entirely not in control of, and it must somehow convey ‘oh god Nat I love you so much I feel like I’m about to combust from it all,’ because the next thing he knows, he’s being kissed on the mouth. On the _mouth._

“Am I dying?” he blurts out. “You’re giving me a pity kiss because Barnes’s brain fucked me up and I’m dying.”

She laughs softly. “You’re not dying. You’re brave and I’m proud of you. I assume you helped Steve?”

“Of course I did,” he says, and that was the correct response because she kisses him again. Then grabs his shoulders and hauls him into a sitting position, like a tiny Russian wrestler. Ugh, he’s feeling too seasick to get suplexed right now. A glass of water is pressed into his hand and he takes a few tentative sips and then promptly chokes when he hears a bloodcurdling bellow of fury from the next room over.

He and Nat glance at each other and then when the shouting is joined by more shouting and the sound of breaking glass, they both lunge for the door, Clint vaulting out of his bed and only staggering a little on the dismount.

In the next bay, chaos reigns. The bed has been knocked sideways with enough force to break the glass wall, there are medical supplies all over the floor and the plastic visitors chair is embedded in the ceiling tile. Tony, Bruce, Rhodey and Sam are _all_ trying to forcibly stop Steve from strangling Deadpool with his bare hands. They’re not having too much success.

“Steve!” Nat rushes to help, trying to prise his fingers from Deadpool’s throat.

“We weren’t done!” Steve bellows. “We were _this close_ to fixing it!”

Still holding onto the doorframe and feeling the floor beneath him swaying - oh man, this feels too much like a concussion, on a boat made of jello, during a hurricane - Clint debates going to find his bow and some tranquilizers. He understands why Steve is so angry but doesnt think squeezing Deadpool’s head from his body is the answer here.

“Hey, kn-knock it off!”

He’s almost knocked over by Bucky storming into the room. He looks like shit, all sweaty and pale and dishevelled, but he’s obviously feeling fit enough to push Tony and Sam out of the way before literally picking Steve up, wrapping his metal arm around Steve’s middle and hefting him up like he’s a toddler. Steve lets out a wordless angry shout and lets go of Deadpool’s neck to grab hold of Bucky’s arm, feet flailing for balance as Bucky totes him outside and drops him to the floor.

“Whedon,” Deadpool gasps, slapping the floor with his palm. “Whedon, Whedon, my safeword is Whedon.”

Outside the room, Steve staggers to his feet, pointing back towards Deadpool but glaring at Bucky. “He pulled us out just as we were about to get rid of the goddamn trigger words!”

“Yeah, b-because _I_ asked him to!”

Clint’s mouth falls open. “What?!”

Steve’s mouth falls open. “What?!”

“You’d seen too m-much,” Bucky says. “And the Soldier was a threat.”

“He was literally doing exactly as I told him to do!” Steve exclaims. “He wasn't a threat in the slightest! What the _hell_ , Bucky?”

“The Winter Soldier tried to k-k-kill you because you were so scared of what you’d seen in there! You were - you were terrified of it and I wasn’t about to p-put you through any more!”

Sam peers over Clint’s shoulder, watching the argument and looking as exasperated as he always does with Steve’s fightin’ talk. “Okay, this is getting out of hand,” he says.

“We should stop them,” says Natasha.

“Be my guest,” says Tony.

“You really wanna get in the middle of that?” says Rhodey.

“The sexual tension is killing me,” says Deadpool.

“Oh, okay,” says Bruce, and morphs into the Hulk. It’s a mark of just how intense the argument is that Steve and Bucky don’t even notice, not until the Hulk lumbers over and separates them by slotting two huge green hands between them and sliding them both back several feet.

“Puny super soldiers stop fighting,” Hulk rumbles. “Hulk no like fighting.”

“I’m not fighting,” Steve says, straining against the firm hold of Hulk’s fist and glaring at Bucky. “I’m telling this dumbass that he’s a dumbass for pulling me out of there!”

“You were scared!” Bucky yells back.

“I wasn't scared!”

“The Soldier literally p-p-pops up when he senses fear and he jumped you after you saw me thinkin’ about us b-bein’ together, it doesn’t take a genius to work out you were scared-”

“The good kind of scared!” Steve shouts, and Bucky abruptly stops bawling him out. “Buck, it was the _good_ kind of scared. Like before you haveta stand up in front of a bunch of people and do a stupid speech about war bonds. Like - like before you get on the Cyclone.”

It’s like the room has held its breath. Steve is staring at Bucky, agonised. He pushes at the Hulk’s hand and Hulk eyes him suspiciously but complies, dropping his hands and shuffling back. He looks a little put out so Clint lets go of the doorway to go stand with him, patting his shoulder in thanks. If he leans on him a little so he doesn’t fall down, well then that’s just between him and Hulk.

Steve uses his new found freedom to step towards Bucky, reaching forwards and taking Bucky's hands in both of his, thumbs rubbing gently at skin and metal alike. “I was tryn’ to tell you that it was the same for me too, Buck, but I just couldn’t get it out. You know what I’m like, talkin’ about feelings.”

“You c-c-can’t talk. Talk about feelings,” Bucky says flatly, and Steve almost laughs. Christ, this is the most open that Clint has seen Cap ever. It’s like Bucky’s taken a nutcracker to him - whoa, that’s a metaphor he doesn’t want to think about considering what he’s seen inside Bucky’s head

“I can’t talk about feelings,” Cap repeats, ruefully confirming even though that’s exactly what he’s doing. “Except maybe I have to suck it up and talk about feelings with you. You know. Talk with you about you, kind of.”

“You’re t-t-tellin’ me...you’ve got. You’ve got feelings...for me?” Bucky asks, sounding like he hardly dares believe it. “Then how come I didn’t see any of that while I was in your head?”

Steve shrugs. His cheeks are going slightly pink. “It’s a new development. I didn’t think it was an option till I saw it. I think I always mighta felt like this a bit, I just didn’t realise what it was as early as you did.”

“What,” Bucky breathes. “You b-b-b-b. Fuck. You _better_ not be makin’ fun.”

“I aint makin’ fun,” Steve says, tugging Bucky closer so they’re almost nose to nose. “I’m telling you it’s the same.”

“But you dreamed of - of marrying Carter.”

“Yeah I did,” Steve says. He looks down, mouth twisting ruefully.  “But that’s gone and it ain’t coming back. Maybe I should...starting thinking about what I got here now. Maybe take a leaf outta your book.”

Clint’s eyes are getting wider and wider. He looks behind him to see Nat, Sam, Tony, Rhodey and Deadpool all crammed in the doorway, watching avidly. Nat has one of her hands over Tony’s mouth and one over Deadpool’s, presumably to stop them ruining the moment. Okay, looks like no-one missed just how gay this all is, and they didn’t even see half of what Clint has.

“You weren’t scare - scared?” Bucky asks, his eyes flicking between Steve’s, a worried frown creasing between his brows. “Or - or creeped out? I thought you’d h-hate me when you f-found out, but you were so damn stubborn and I knew you wouldn’t qu - qu- fuck, I knew you wouldn’t leave it ‘till I let you t-try.”

“Okay maybe I was a little scared,” Steve says, and he leans closer, so close that his nose touches Bucky’s. It’s like he’s mesmerised. “I think I am scared. Scared of it all changing again.”

“Change can be good,” Bucky says, and he lifts a trembling hand to push Steve’s hair back off his forehead. “Stevie, if you’re messing with me-”

Steve kisses him. They all hear the shocked little breath that Bucky lets out, all see the way his hands come up to hold onto Steve’s elbows.

 _Elbows!_ Clint thinks, delighted. Romantic as _fuck_.

Loud applause startles them and they break apart, both blushing. It’s Deadpool. “Hashtag at least that wasn’t too much of a slow burn,” he says, still clapping. “Hurrah for sticking it to Hollywood heteronormativity, guys.”

Steve looks pained. “Will someone please shut him up,” he says, and pulls Bucky in for a hug, one arm around his waist and the other around his back. He rests his head against Bucky’s and exhales, seeming to relax for the first time - well, the first time this century. They stand there together like there’s no one else in the room, like they weren’t shouting at each other thirty seconds ago, like there’s not still the unfinished business of the trigger words. Clint would be jealous but Nat kissed him so he’s totally winning at life right now.

Speaking of Nat, he sees that she’s watching Bucky and Steve with a small fond smile on her face. Tony turns away, eyebrows literally at his hairline, muttering something about all the punching and stabbing being a very strange way to show affection. Rhodey is trying to hide a grin, patting Tony on the shoulder. Sam rolls his eyes and sets about cleaning up the medbay, jumping up to try and grab the legs of the chair that's still stuck in the ceiling.

“Hulk like happy endings,” Hulk says, sounding pleased.

“Not quite at a happy ending yet pal,” Clint says, patting his bicep. “But we’re getting there.”

 

* * *

 

Steve sits back on his couch, one hand gently stroking his hand over Bucky’s hair while he taps away on his phone with the other, searching Youtube for decent cat videos that he hasn’t already seen. Bucky is sprawled over him like some sort of murdery cat himself, snoring lightly. Even though Bucky is sweaty and way too heavy, and his metal arm is digging into Steve’s ribs, Steve never wants to move.

There’s a knock at his door but Steve doesn’t bother to get up or answer. He’s perfectly content to sit and just be with-

His door clicks then opens, because of course it does.

Tony, Rhodey and Sam walk in, looking completely unrepentant. Steve narrows his eyes at Sam.

“I expected better of you.”

“Don’t do the disappointed face,” Sam implores. “Man, that’s cold.”

“You deserve it.”

“Hey, Tony is the one who broke in.”

“And you let him. Where’s Clint? He’s my new best friend.”

“I’m your b-best friend,” Bucky mumbles, without opening his eyes. “T-t-take that back.”

“You’ve drooled on my shirt,” Steve points out. “You’re all terrible.”

“Yes, Cap has lots of friends, can we please get down to business,” Rhodey says, and Steve is so distracted by the ‘loads of friends’ comment that he almost missed the second, more ominous half of the sentence.

“Business?”

“Helen wants to put Barnes into the cradle to try and fix the damage that’s causing the seizures, but she wants Barnes to decide if we're doing that or removing the trigger words before she tries it.”

Bucky cracks an eye open. “Someone get some decent pain- painkillers before you send anyone else into my b-b-brain.”

Tony wanders over, sits down in Steve's armchair like he owns the place. Well, like he metaphorically owns the place, seeing as he literally does. He crosses a leg over and rests an ankle on his knee, jeans rucking up and revealing a pair of bright purple Hawkeye socks. He looks around like he'd rather pretend to be interested in Steve's lack of interior design than look directly at him and Bucky, tapping his fingers against the arm of the chair. “So. We’ve all decided that as morbidly curious as we are about the state of affairs in there, we don’t want to invade Barnes’s privacy.”

Steve turns his glare on Tony. “You break into my rooms nearly every day and suddenly you’re worried about privacy?”

Bucky snorts, pushing himself up by placing a very distracting hand on Steve’s pec. Steve just looks at him, wondering how he’s ever going to be able to function again without thinking about how that mouth feels on his.

“The actual issue isn't p-privacy, it's that the - the Winter Soldier is still p-part of me and he won’t listen to any of you ‘cept Steve,” he says, and turns to look at Steve. God, his eyes are very blue. Steve wants to paint them, then finds himself shocked at the _want_. “S’gonna have to b-b-be you, honey.”

“Honey?” Tony echoes, sounding skeptical. “Did the Winter Soldier just call Cap _honey_?”

Steve sighs. “Rhodey?”

“Yeah, on it,” Rhodey says, and hauls Tony up and out of the chair, turning him around and steering him out of the room. “Come on Tones, before you get brained with the shield.”

“He would never. I’m his best friend, he wouldn’t brain me.”

“I hate to break this to you but you’re like fifth on the list.”

“You’d be higher if you stopped breaking into my rooms,” Steve shouts as they vanish back out onto the corridor. “Sam, give us a minute?”

“Sure,” Sam says. “But a minute is a minute. We leave Clint unattended with Deadpool for too much longer and shit’s gonna go down.”

“Understood,” Steve says. “Thanks Sam.”

“Sixty seconds,” Sam says, walking towards the door. “Use protection!”

Steve feels his cheeks burning, lunging across to grab a pillow, hurling it to hit Sam’s retreating ass. Sam just laughs and kicks the door closed behind him.

“Your f-friends are assholes.”

“Well you're my best friend so what does that make you?”

“I'm your b-b-boyfriend, I'm exempt.”

Steve screws up his nose, holding his arms up as Bucky flops back down onto him, shifting around to get comfy. “Boyfriend? Doesn't that sound a little juvenile?”

“What would you rather call me? Your steady squeeze? Fancy man? Significant assassin? Murderous sweetheart?”

“Boyfriend will do,” Steve says. “You're terrible.”

Bucky grins but then he twitches hard, and his eyes roll back. Steve hastily catches his shoulders but Bucky only goes lax for a second before he's straightening up again.

“Where're you at?”

Bucky looks around. “Your dumb f-f-friends broke in?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “You gotta decide if you want to do the cradle first or trigger word removal.”

“Ugh,” Bucky says and tries to hide in Steve's armpit. “You decide.”

“No,” Steve says firmly. “Buck, you decide.”

“I can't make my own m-m-medical decisions, I've got. I’ve got brain damage.”

Steve jabs him in the side. “You're awful,” he says sternly. “Just because I'm your boyfriend doesn't mean I'm making your decisions for you.”

Bucky pops his head back up, like an inquisitive meerkat. His hair is a mess. “Boyfriend? I like that. We going steady, pal?”

“I'd like that,” Steve says. “If you promise not to go anywhere.”

Bucky goes to get comfortable again, nuzzling his cheek against Steve's pec. “Not leaving you now sweetheart. You're never g-gonna be on your own again. Me and those asshole friends of yours won't allow it.”

Steve's insides feel all twisted up and around. It's a kind of nice feeling. “Alright pal. Now make your mind up. Cradle or triggers first?”

Bucky seems to think about it. Even though he's different nowadays his concentrating face is exactly the same as it has been since he was eight years old. It makes Steve want to bury himself under Bucky's skin, get closer to him than actually physically possible.

Well, considering the events of the past few days maybe he shouldn't be dismissing the idea as impossible.

“You think if - if we do the cradle f-f-first my brain will be less of a shithole when we go b-back in?”

Steve hums thoughtfully. “That's a theory.”

“Well you know theories need testing,” Bucky says. “Let's g-go do - let's go do science on me.”

Steve hastily looks back towards the door, just in case Tony heard that and is going to take it as an invitation. As he does, Bucky has the audacity to get up, making like he’s going to do something else other than cuddle Steve all day.

“Buck,” Steve says, without knowing what he wants to say or do, halting Bucky's awkward clamber off the couch. Bucky pauses, knees sinking into the cushions. He takes one look at Steve's face and somehow reads his goddamn mind.

“I'll be okay. This p-p-pro. Procede- Damn. This thing'll be a piece of cake.”

Steve feels himself relax. He slides his hands onto Bucky's waist. Necessary touch. “How'd you know? I didn't even know I was worried about that.”

Bucky smiles, lopsided and gorgeous. “You kidding me, Rogers?” he grins, rapping his metal knuckles on Steve's forehead, which, _ouch_. Asshole. “I know you inside out. Remember, I've b-been in your brain too.”

 

* * *

 

Steve still tries to call off the procedure twice before it starts. He’s a little ashamed to admit that he has a bit of a moment in which he attempts to pull rank and order the medical team off of the premises. Tony tries to tell him he’s being ridiculous. Steve tells him rather forcefully that he _knows_ he’s being ridiculous, but he can’t fuckin’ help it. Tony walks off and for a moment Steve thinks it’s because he yelled at him, but after twenty minutes Tony comes back with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a glass in the other. He makes Steve sit in one of three plastic medbay chairs that he’s put outside in the corridor and passes him the bottle, sitting inbetween him and his shield and sipping from the glass.

“This won’t do anything,” Steve says, sniffing the bottle and wincing slightly. He’s not had whiskey since that time Bucky mostly-died and he tried to drink himself into oblivion.

“Pretend you’re a nineteen fifties husband,” Tony says. “Drink and brood.”

“I missed the fifties,” Steve points out but does as he’s told. Just as he expected, the whiskey doesn’t do shit, but sitting with a friend by his side kind of does.

Four hours later, Bruce appears with a tired smile on his face. Steve jumps up, shoves the empty bottle into Tony’s hands and runs into Bucky’s bay, nearly knocking the door off its hinges in his haste. Helen gives him an exasperated look. Bucky smiles, sitting up against the pillows of his bed.

Steve barrels over, reaching out blindly. Bucky catches his hands and pulls them to his mouth, clumsily kissing his knuckles. “I’m s-s-s-still here,” he says. “Quit looking at me like that, I ain’t g-g-going anywhere.”

“You’re still stammering,” Steve blurts.

Bucky gives him a flat look. “N-n-no shit.”

“We thinks it’s an anxiety response,” Helen says. “That’s not something the cradle can fix. Though the seizures should have stopped. His latest scans look much better - the damaged areas appear to have regenerated as planned.”

“Thank you,” Steve says, wiping his eyes on his sleeve as best he can without letting go of Bucky’s hand. “I didn’t mean to say you hadn’t - I just. I noticed it and I thought - not that I thought you couldn't! Or that you should have, because you’ve already done - Oh god, I’m sorry, Tony got me drunk.”

“You can't get drunk, you big lug,” Bucky says. “C’mere.” He pulls him in for a kiss, nose bumping Steve’s. Steve laughs, unsteady and wavering, then Bucky laughs back and before he knows it, they’re both clutching each other and laughing, deep hysterical laughter that’s stretched between joy and relief.

Hiccuping slightly, Steve pulls back and pushes Bucky’s sweat-damp and greasy hair back from his forehead. “You sure you feel okay?”

“Yep.”

“Alright,” Steve says, and runs a finger across Bucky’s brow. “Let's get me back in there.”

“That’s what he said,” a voice says from the door. It’s Deadpool, standing there with his mask rolled up, revealing the startlingly scarred and puckered skin of his chin. He’s eating a hotdog, chewing noisily and spattering mustard to the floor.

“You - you can’t eat in here,” Helen says, sounding bewildered that anyone would even _think_ about it.

“Oh don’t worry, the author doesn’t have any time for complications,” Deadpool shrugs. “I could literally pee on the floor and set you on fire and she’d pretend it didn’t happen so we can get this bad boy wrapped up.”

“Do I have to tell him not to pee on the floor?” Helen asks.

“Possibly,” Steve says. “Though...even if he’s making no sense, I kind of agree with him.”

Bucky blinks. “You do?”

Deadpool pauses. “You do?”

“Yes,” Steve says. “I don’t care what happens right now, we’ve got a mission to finish. I need to find Clint and ask him if he’s coming with me again.”

“No,” Bucky complains. “I d-d-don’t want him in my head again.”

“He really helped me out last time,” Steve says. “Clint’s good people.”

“I know,” Bucky says. “But doesn’t mean I want him all up in my b-business.”

“He’s already seen everything I have.”

“Steve, listen to me. I’m saying _no_.”

“Will you not even consider it?”

Bucky looks at Helen. “Can you sedate him a little? Got any - got any xanax that will work on a super soldier?”

Helen is already busy looking at Bucky’s scans which is probably why her answer is somewhat absent-minded. “Captain Rogers’ personality flaws cannot be fixed by any pharmaceuticals or chemicals that I currently possess.”

Steve feels the frown creep back over his face. “Flaws?”

“Yes, your stubbornness is not as endearing as you think it is,” Bucky says, and starts looking around. “Dr Cho, Ma’am, can I g-g-get out of this bed?”

“Of course,” she says, and Bucky gives her a smile that reminds Steve of the way he used to look at dames back in the day. Given what he now knows, he suspects it might be a little fake. Or maybe not _fake_ , just not as flirtatious as Steve always assumed.

Once he’s out of the hospital, he switches of the mister-nice persona, smile replaced by a grumpy-cat scowl that he directs at Steve. “You know, I didn’t end up in the hospital once when I was on the run after you b-blew up SHIELD.”

“ _We_ blew up SHIELD. What’s your point?”

“Bein’ around you is clearly bad for - bad for my health,” Bucky says, and then backtracks, presumably because Steve has come to a standstill and is most definitely doing kermit-face. “Oh honey, d-d-d-don’t look like that. It was a joke, come on.”

Bucky plasters himself all up Steve’s front, arms winding around his neck, nuzzling at his chin. Fifty percent cat, Steve swears. Steve’s still kind of unamused, trying to wedge his arms inbetween their bodies so he can cross them over his chest. With any other person it could have worked but Bucky’s too strong for it; he objects to the arm-crossing by taking Steve’s wrists and forcibly wrapping his arms around him. Steve resists a little, purely on principle.

Now he’s got Steve’s arms wrapped around his waist, Bucky crosses his arms over his chest, leaning back a little to look at Steve. Ugh, what an asshole. “You’re no f-f-fun.”

“Well, I was frozen in ice for seventy years, woke up and found all my friends were dead-”

“I wasn’t dead.”

“-and the one friend who miraculously wasn’t dead tried to kill me,” Steve finishes. “And I didn’t understand credit cards, fashion or the goddamn pull tabs on cans of coke. Buck, until you got back, everything _sucked_.”

Bucky wraps his arms back around his neck. “Everything? But you got the high-life, look at this place. And. And you’re a superhero.”

“Okay, things for Captain America worked out great,” Steve says, rubbing his nose against the metal plates of Bucky’s arm. Only a little though, because it’s dangerously close to Bucky’s armpit and while Steve may think that Bucky's the best thing since nineteen forty-four, he definitely needs a shower.  

“Oh,” Bucky says.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Oh.”

There’s a long silence. Steve can sense that Bucky’s dying to say something, all fidgety and twitchy, biting his lip-

“You didn’t understand cans of coke?”

“I worked it out.”

“Good.”

 

* * *

 

They go to the common room for the final showdown. Steve did contemplate setting up in his room but now he and Bucky are boyfriends - ugh, he hates and loves that word already - it feels too intimate. If he and Bucky spend any more time lying on his bed together, he certainly doesn’t want to do it surrounded by Avengers and Deadpool.

So, the couches it is. They opt for the huge corner monstrosity, lying at right angles with their heads touching in the corner. The rest of the Avengers - sans Clint, who, in a rare showing of self-preservation, apparently said he was done with the madness and was instead going to go and sleep for four days straight - all stand behind the breakfast bar like it’ll shield them from any wayward necromancer powers.

“You doing alright there, Cap?”

“I can’t believe we’re doing this again.”

“Where’s his shield, I feel like it should be here.”

“Twenty bucks says he pukes when he wakes up.”

“Twenty bucks says Barnes tries to kill him again.”

“Be helpful or get out,” Steve calls firmly, and the peanut gallery obediently falls quiet. The only sound is Deadpool munching on popcorn, scattering wayward pieces all over the counter. Steve reaches back to find Bucky, fingers pressing against his shoulder. “I know you’re not going to try and kill me.”

“J-j-just g-get it over with.” Bucky grouches, but he does reach up to hold onto Steve’s hand, metal fingers gripping tightly.

“I assume it’s a no on the side-effects?” the necromancer asks.

“No,” Steve says.

“Hard pass,” says Bucky.

“Alright,” says the necromancer, and then there’s blinding white light, pain, then nothing.

 

* * *

 

Wincing, Steve sits up. He rubs the back of his head, opens his eyes and promptly nearly chokes on nothing. “God bless Helen Cho,” he whispers, wide eyed and reverent. Because this is definitely Bucky’s brain - he’s back in the lobby of the shitty tenement - except that this time round it’s not nearly as awful as it was. The holes in the floor are gone. The windows are no longer boarded up, just darkened. The pictures are hanging straight. The goddamn walls and carpets are clean. Sure, it’s still the same tenement, no five star ratings round here, but it now looks like a place people could actually live, rather than a place that would be condemned.

Steve might take a moment just to cry from sheer relief. No-one can see while he’s in here, so he doesn’t have to try and blame it on the dust or the cleaning product that’s evidently been used on the admittedly still thin carpets.

“Why’re you c-crying, you big jerk?”

He scrambles up and literally flings himself at Bucky, who yelps indignantly as he finds himself carrying the weight of an emotional super soldier.

“Steve, you’re too heavy for this shit,” Bucky complains, though he’s stroking the back of Steve’s head with his real hand and holding him tight around the waist with his metal arm so Steve’s inclined to believe he doesn't mean it. “Oh,” Bucky says, looking around. “Was k-kinda hoping it’d look like the Ritz in here once we were done.”

“She can't completely remake your brain,” Steve says. “Just tidy up the one you got. What you complaining for anyway, it looks nice.”

“Ain’t nothin' like Grand Central,” Bucky mutters, then lets him go. “Right, where are these motherfucking t-trigger words?”

“Basement,” Steve says. “I hope the Winter Soldier keeps his distance.”

“He’s clocked you as his handler, you know.”

Steve cringes, unsure how he feels about that. “I’m just worried he’ll react when he realizes he’s being decommissioned.

Bucky’s smile fades. “Yeah,” he says, but doesn’t offer anything more.

Sam would probably know what to do here, what he could say to help, but Sam is a gift in human form and Steve is an emotionally stunted trainwreck, so all he can do is carry on with the mission. He starts walking, Bucky falling into step behind him.

They stop just outside the vent that will lead them down into the crawlspace and the trigger words beyond. Christ, it was a good job they had Clint here last time around; Steve can’t think of any other person who would eyeball a vent and consider it a logical searching place, not while there were still actual doors and windows to be checked. Maybe he should request some more recon missions with Clint. He could possibly learn a thing or two.

“You ready?” he asks Bucky.

“No,” Bucky says. “Maybe we sh-should just leave it.”

“Buck,” Steve admonishes. “You’ve gotta do this. You’ll be your own man once we get it done. Completely in control.”

“That’s not. Not. Not as reassuring as you think it sh-should be,” Bucky sighs.

“Look, we’re not getting rid of that part of you,” Steve says. “Just making sure...making sure no-one takes advantage of it.”

Bucky stares at him and then it’s Steve’s turn to be almost knocked over by an armful of super-soldier. Bucky nearly pitches them both over with the force of the hug, pressing clumsy kisses to Steve’s mouth.

“Whoa, what’s this for?”

“I thought you’d wanna g-g-g-get rid of that p-part of me entirely,” Bucky says. “Make me back how I was.”

“I’ve been on my own long enough in this godforsaken century to know there’s no going back,” Steve says. He reaches up to push Bucky’s hair back from his face with both hands. “And if there’s someone willing to watch my back, I’m kinda glad it’s a someone who knows how to do it with extreme prejudice. Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

Bucky grins, crooked. “I get it. I’ll take care of the unsavoury shit, you keep your reputation squeaky clean.”

“Captain America’s reputation,” Steve corrects, then puts Bucky down. “Come on. Let’s get this over with. The longer I’m out, the more chance they’ll have to mess with me.”

He goes to duck into the vent but Bucky catches his wrist. “You d-d-don’t think they’d mess with you, right?” he asks. “Steve, when you were in my head they were so worried about you. Even Stark.”

Steve opens his mouth to argue but Bucky huffs and just talks right over him. “I can’t b-believe its seventy years on and I’m still havin’ to tell you that yes these people are your friends. You’re still. Still so damn defensive.”

Steve scowls, knowing that Bucky has kind of got a point. “Okay. Can we deal with your brain issues first and then we’ll deal with mine later?”

“So much therapy,” Bucky agrees, and shoulders Steve out the way to climb into the vent.

 

* * *

 

Steve feels himself bracing for a fight even as he slides awkwardly through the vent that’s barely big enough for his shoulders. He feels his heart-rate picking up slightly, all his senses focusing in on the moment. It’s not fear; it’s something close to adrenaline, something that primes him for battle. He thinks he recognises the feeling from before, when he was five foot six on tiptoes, but he’s spent so long with the serum that by this point he can't really tell. Great, Erksine would be  thrilled to hear that he’s gotten all complacent about it, how he’s starting to take it for granted-

Bucky slides out of the vent with a thump, and Steve has to stop giving himself a hard time because he knows he’s about six feet away from a potential fight, especially if the Soldier is still there and has started reading the trigger words-

“Son of a bitch,” Bucky says.

“What?!”

“Son of a fucking bitch,” Bucky says again.

Steve hauls himself out of the vent and leaps up, ready to fight-

“Well, son of a bitch,” he echoes, stumbling to a halt.

The Soldier is there. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking placidly up at Bucky and Steve, a knife in his hand.

The walls are bare.

Flakes of paint cover the floor, the tiny red scraps the only evidence that there were ever any words here at all. There’s a couple of scratch marks on the wall to show where the words have been meticulously scraped away but that’s it.

“готов подчиниться,” the Soldier says to Bucky.

Bucky’s mouth flickers in a weak smile. “I know, b-buddy,” he says.

The soldier gives Bucky a curt nod, looks briefly at Steve without trying to kill him, then leaves. He slides back out of the vent almost soundlessly which is both unnerving and impressive considering the amount of tac gear and weapons he’s carrying.

“What did he say to you?” Steve asks.

“Nothing im-important,” Bucky says, but he’s smiling. “G-g-guess you’re not his handler after all.”

“No offense but that’s a responsibility I’ll gladly reassign,” Steve says, staring at the walls. “We didn’t even need to come back in here.”

“We didn’t know he was gonna do this,” Bucky says, then turns to sleeve and slots his fingers into the loops of his belt. “We’ve got - we’ve got an hour to kill before they wake me up for a check in.”

“Shall we wait in the lobby?”

“Or...you could. You could sh-sh. You could show me what is was that got you all bent out of shape?”

Steve feels himself flushing. Christ, he’s probably so red right now. He mentally curses his Irish complex then mentally apologizes to his mother for disrespecting his heritage. He clears his throat. Summons up some courage. “Room 223.”

Bucky’s grin turns wicked. “Come on then. What’re we w-w-waiting for?”

“I am going to die of embarrassment,” Steve announces, even as Bucky’s tugging him towards the vent by his goddamn belt. Steve needs to stop thinking about how close Bucky’s fingers are to his dick. Down that path lies madness.

“What a way to go,” Bucky says seriously. “Now come on. We got an hour of privacy left and I intend to use it well.”

And even though Steve's technically the boss because no-one else seems to want to be, all he can do is say, “Yes sir,” and do exactly what Bucky tells him to do.

 

* * *

 

When they wake up, everyone is crowded around in a manner so overbearing that Steve's fight reflex kicks in and he nearly ends up punching Tony right in the nose. Unfortunately, Bucky’s fight reflex kicks in and he does punch Deadpool right in the mouth, sending him flying backwards across the room.

“I did warn you,” says Sam, who is sat on a stool at the counter, arms folded and looking unimpressed.

“You could have stopped them,” Steve points out, pushing Tony back and sitting up, rubbing at his head. He feels awful, like one sudden move will have him throwing up. Someone's gone so far as to put a wastepaper bin down by his knee, probably anticipating the same.

“ _Don’t_ do the disappointed face - oh man, Steve, really? I’m gonna put a bag on your head.”

Steve fixes Sam with 2.3 more seconds of disappointed face then turns his attention to Bucky. Mostly because Bucky has decided to shove his way onto Steve’s knee like some sort of lap-panther, covering his eyes with his palm and swallowing convulsively. He presses his face into Steve’s chest, shivering slightly.

“Alright, time to go,” Natasha says, trying to discreetly make everyone leave. When that doesn’t work, she jabs her fingers into Tony’s armpit and makes him move. Everyone else swiftly departs, clearly scared of Natasha’s Russian-assassin-death-grip skills.

“Buck," Steve mumbles into Bucky’s hair. “You okay?”

“I feel like I got punched by a train,” Bucky says. “And I fuckin’ love you.”

“You’re only saying that because in your imagination I can get my ankles behind my head,” Steve jokes lamely, then stops joking as Bucky pinches him, hard. “Ow, ow, get off you fuckin’ maniac!”

“That was the worst response to someone - someone declaring their love for you, _ever_ ,” Bucky snaps back.

Oh man. Steve reruns the last ten seconds in his mind and yep, Bucky’s totally right.

(Sam says that Steve is pretty much his own worst enemy. He kind of knew that, but this is undeniable proof. He’s never going to live this down. He’s so aware of just how much he’s fucked up that he’s contemplating actually texting Sam and asking for help.)

“Boys?”

Oh thank god, Steve thinks as Natasha comes back in, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry to interrupt-”

“No you’re n-not,” Bucky says.

The apologetic look vanishes like it’s been wiped away, replaced with an _‘oops you got me’_ smile. The apologetic tone of voice vanishes too as she straightens up and says, “We need to check if it’s actually worked or not.”

“Fine,” Bucky says, still glowering at Steve.

“Okay,” Natasha says, and before Steve can tell her to hold her fuckin’ horses, she says, “Спутник.”

Steve cringes, but nothing happens. No-one blacks out, has a seizure or tries to stab Steve. In fact, Bucky doesn’t even blink.

“Can you go now?” he asks Natasha.

“Sure,” she shrugs, and then winks at Steve before walking away and leaving him at Bucky’s mercy.

“So,” Steve says lamely. “It worked.”

“You d-don’t have to love me back,” Bucky replies, and Steve winces again like Bucky’s punched him right in the feels. “But you can’t belittle me saying I love you. That’s not fuckin’ fair.”

“You’re right,” Steve says. “Can I make it up to you?”

Bucky eyes him suspiciously. “How?”

Steve shrugs and smiles, hoping it’s conveying ‘you like me and my face so please don’t be mad no more’. “By putting my ankles behind my head?”

And even though Steve’s seen Bucky move and act as the Winter Soldier, he swears he’s never seen him move quite so fuckin’ fast as he does when he literally grabs Steve’s wrist and drags him towards the stairwell and up to the privacy of his rooms.

 

* * *

 

Two hours later, Steve is lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling feeling a little like he’s having an out of body experience. He’s sweaty and aching and gross and caught somewhere between still-turned-on and too stunned to move.

“I,” he croaks, chest heaving. He wipes his sweaty brow with his wrist. “I was actually joking about that.”

Bucky flops down next to him, biting gently at the meat of Steve’s shoulder. “Consider me made up to.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Steve says, shivering as Bucky kisses across his collarbone. His body been put through a lot in his twenty-seven slash ninety-seven years, including rebirth, being shot, stabbed, frozen in the arctic, blown through windows, beaten by aliens, electrocuted, buried under buildings, but he has never been quite so aware of himself until now.

“You d-don’t make any sense,” Bucky replies.

“I love you,” Steve blurts out.

Bucky stares down at him, and then says, “You’re only saying that because I m-managed to get your ankles behind your head,” and Steve tries to smother him with a pillow. Bucky’s ugly-snort-laughing even as the fighting turns from ‘by god you’re so annoying I need to shut you up’ into something more like ‘by god you’re so sexy I need to rub all up against you.’ Steve thinks it might actually evolve into more of Bucky showing him exactly what he’s been fantasising about for the past forever, but then there’s a soft beep and then Jarvis ruins the mood by talking.

“Sir would like to inform you that, and I am directly quoting here, he has no shame and will still break in even if you two are doing the nasty.”

“You need new friends," Bucky sighs.

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” Steve exclaims, and then sulks for four seconds before getting up to find some clothes. He pulls on a pair of sweats and tries to pull on a t-shirt, which Bucky wrestles away from him, and then gives up as he hears his front door unlocking.

“You’re the worst,” he says to Bucky, who just lounges back on the bed looking very pleased with himself.

Steve goes out to face Tony, and before Tony can start talking, he says, “You have ten seconds and then I’m literally going to throw you out.”

“You’re not the boss of me.”

“I don’t have to be your boss to throw you out of my apartment. Six seconds.”

“Christ, Cap. You think you’d be more cheerful now you got laid.”

Turns out that ten seconds was too generous anyway. Steve picks Tony up, deposits him outside in the corridor and shuts the door in his face.

There’s another beep and the intercom system that Steve thought he disabled lights up. “I’m gonna start wearing the suit when I come to visit,” Tony’s voice says from the panel by the door. “Anyway, we’re going to try a thing, we will be having team dinner altogether to improve our communication and get to know each other outside of missions. Whatever, it’s Sam’s idea, so we have to. Clint requested pizza. Seven PM sharp, please cover your nipples if you’re going to join us. I don’t mean to be rude, but those things are distracting.”

Steve puts his back to the door and laughs. Honestly. “Dinner at seven,” he confirms. “If you leave me alone until then.”

“Barnes is invited too as long as he leaves the weapons,” Tony says. “Basically, no tits or knives at team dinner, though I’m not sure where that leaves Romanov-”

“Goodbye Tony,” Steve says. He punches the intercom so it can’t possibly make any more noise, and then walks away.  He finds Bucky is actually out of the bed, standing naked in the doorway of the bedroom with such casual ease it’s like its something he does every day. Steve can get on board with it being something he does every day.

“Your f-friends are the worst,” Bucky says.

“They’re alright,” Steve shrugs.

“Oh I know. You fit right in.”

“Punk.

“Jerk.”

Steve walks forwards, slots his hands onto Bucky’s waist. “They’re now your friends too,” he says. “If you’re serious about staying. I think the Avengers might be a package deal.”

“You think?” Bucky snorts. “Alright. I guess you’re worth it.”

“You guess?”

Bucky frowns. “Rogers, if by this p-p-point you don’t believe that I would put up with a hell of a lot to be with you, may-maybe we need to send you back into my brain.”

And all Steve can do is grin like the love-sick idiot he probably is, and try and kiss the scowl right off of Bucky’s face.

 

* * *

 

**Epilogue**

Steve Rogers is curled up in bed when the call comes in. He’s sprawled out on his back with Bucky nestled into his side, head resting on Steve’s shoulder. One of his thighs is thrown forwards over Steve’s, pretty effectively pinning him in place. The sound Bucky makes when his nap is rudely interrupted is nothing short of wounded, like a bear being forced out of hibernation.

“Decline,” he protests, voice rough with sleep, trying to hide under the pillow.

“It might be important,” Steve says, groping along his side-table to try and pick up his phone, knocking aside books, his alarm clock and a stray sketching pencil. He can’t reach and Bucky is literally doing nothing to help. In fact, he seems to have somehow increased gravity or his own personal mass, going utterly deadweight on Steve so he can’t move an inch.

“You’re gonna have to get off me at some point, Clint and Nat are coming over for breakfast.”

“Is it socially acceptable to invite your f-friends in for breakfast in bed?”

“Since when have you cared about about being socially acceptable?”

“I used to. You know, back in the thirties.”

“I’m gonna veto breakfast in bed, mostly because I’m not ready for my friends to see me naked.”

“You’re not fun,” Bucky grouches, then lets out another aggrieved noise when the phone starts ringing again.

Steve shoves Bucky off him and onto the mattress, sitting up so he can reach the phone. It’s an unknown number which he eyes suspiciously for a moment then decides to answer it anyway.

(Sam says that one day Steve will take potential security threats seriously. Steve isn’t liking Sam’s odds on that one. Besides, he's not that worried: now he and Bucky live together it’s like having his own security detail 24/7.)

“Rogers speaking.”

“Cap! It’s me, Deadpool!”

Steve shuts his eyes and stifles a groan. Bucky pops up from under the pillow, looking outraged. His hair is a mess and Steve loves him so fiercely it hurts. “Hang up,” Bucky hisses. “Hang up and burn the phone.”

“Hi Wade,” Steve says. Bucky makes a disgusted noise and rolls out of bed, yanking his boxers on like they’ve personally offended him before stalking through to the kitchen. Steve watches him go with one part exasperation, one part fondness and one part appreciation for his ass. He’s so busy admiring the view that he almost misses Deadpool’s next piece of ridiculousness.

“Just requesting an update on my Avengers membership card.”

Steve sighs, climbs out of bed and tugs his sweats on. He clamps the phone between his ear and shoulder, picks up one of Bucky’s stray socks. “I’ve told you, I’m not giving you permission to be part of the Avengers.”

“But you’re in charge. Literally one of the themes of this whole nonsensical story has been you accepting your status as leader of the team. I mean it’s subtle, not as in your face as the whole friendship and belonging thing-”

“Wade,” Steve interrupts. “I know I’m in charge. I’m _choosing_ to not give you permission to be part of the Avengers.”

“How about I come over and we talk out our options?”

“You step foot in my building and Bucky will shoot you,” Steve reminds him. “And I don’t understand why you keep askin’ seeing as you are utterly unwilling to work as a unit or be told what to do.”

“I want to expand my franchise. And get the Avengers discount on the subway.”

“Goodbye, Wade,” Steve says firmly and hangs up. He leaves the bedroom and goes out into the lounge slash kitchen slash library slash weapons cache of the apartment, yawning and stretching in the warm morning light. Bucky’s got the coffee maker on and has already broken two apartment rules: there’s a Glock on the table and a cat on the windowsill, one that is shamelessly begging for food. Bucky’s obliging it because of course he is, holding out a forkful of tuna.

“I thought we said we’d stop feeding the strays inside the apartment,” Steve says, wrapping his arms around Bucky’s waist and hooking his chin over his shoulder.

“She’s not technically in the apartment,” Bucky says, and puts the fork down on the sill so the cat can finish it. He turns in Steve’s arms, pressing a metal finger to Steve’s lips to shush him. “And before you say anything, the gun is a precaution in case Deadpool turns up.”

“Well can it be locked away until he actually does?” Steve says against the finger. “You tell me to not bring work home and here you are, leavin’ yours out onto table.”

“My baby is not work, she’s a necessity,” Bucky says and flicks Steve on the nose. “Bite me, Rogers.”

Steve does. Bucky gasps and bites him back. They’re about 12% on their way to having sex on the table when there’s a knock on the door.

“Fuck,” Bucky pouts. “If that’s Deadpool I’m gonna shoot him.”

“And if its Natasha she’ll most likely steal your gun,” Steve says, patting Bucky on the ass. “Go put clothes on.”

He tries to shoo the cat out, puts the Glock away, opens the door to thankfully find Clint and Nat and not Deadpool. Even better, they’ve bought bagels. Once they’re in, Clint immediately starts raiding the refrigerator. Natasha takes Steve’s coffee and starts shamelessly flicking through the pile of unopened mail on the table. Bucky reappears with clothes and steals Steve’s coffee from Natasha before sitting his ass right on Steve’s knee and kissing him on the cheek. He does it in front of people just to make Steve blush, he swears.

It’s okay. Steve kinda likes it.

Clint tells them all about the apartment building he’s accidentally purchased in Bed-Stuy. Natasha tells them all about Tony threatening to buy Steve and Bucky’s building so he can evict them and make them move back into the tower. Steve rolls his eyes but makes a mental note to take Tony out for drinks and dinner soon.

They’re cleaning crumbs off plates when Steve’s phone rings again. Bucky threatens to shoot it if it’s Deadpool, and then threatens to shoot it again when he sees it’s Tony. He climbs off Steve’s knee, busying himself with aggressively watering the plants while muttering mutinously about _‘first day off in weeks, Rogers.’_

“Hi, Tony.”

“Oh Captain, my Captain, any chance you can pop in? Use that stellar work ethic of yours to clock some overtime?”

“It’s my day off,” Steve says.

“I know that, but we’ve got a mad scientist in Cincinnati that’s been playing with gamma radiation and it’s making Bruce a bit green around the gills, you know gamma radiation is his thing. Come on, I’m trying to be a good friend here. Bruce needs us.”

“If it’s not an official assemble he don't have to,” Bucky says loudly, leaning across to shout into the phone.

Steve pushes Bucky back with a hand _and_ a foot, trying in vain to get him to butt out. Honestly, if he wanted to yell at Tony down the phone he should stop worrying so much about being tracked and get his own damn smartphone. “Sorry, Tony," Steve says. "How about...you buy us second breakfast and we’ll be there in an hour.”

“An hour? It doesn't take an hour to get here from Red Hook."

Steve raises an eyebrow. "Uh, yes it does?"

Tony still sounds sceptical. "A whole hour? Like, you know an hour is sixty minutes, right?"

"When was the last time you travelled across New York without the suit?" Steve points out. "Yes, an hour. And that's if I can get Bucky to leave in the next five minutes."

Tony huffs. "Jeez, Cap, this is why you should have stayed in Manhattan.”

“One hour and bacon or no deal,” Steve says firmly. “Work life balance, remember?”

“What even is that,” Tony says in disgust and then hangs up. He texts Steve half a second later saying ‘crispy or not’ so Steve guesses they’ve reached a compromise.

“Ugh,” Bucky says. “N-n-now I gotta put shoes on. Someone call an Uber.”

“I thought we could catch the subway,” Steve says and the others all look at him like he’s grown an extra head.

“The subway? At this time of day?”

“It’ll take forever.”

“I’ve lost my Metrocard.”

“Why the hell would you wanna do that?”

“Nostalgia?” Steve shrugs, looking at Bucky. “Me and you ain’t been on the subway together since nineteen forty one.”

“That’s because it smells funny and is full of commuters and lunatics,” Bucky says. “Don’t pull that face at me, Rogers - don’t. Oh man, it’s like kicking a puppy. Steve, _stop._ ”

“Well, as romantic as this all is, I am not going on the subway,”  Natasha says. “Meet you there.”

“What she said,” Clint says, grabbing his jacket and keys. “Later losers.”

“You see Deadpool anywhere near the building, you shoot him, got that?” Bucky shouts as they leave.

“You can go with them if you like,” Steve shrugs, looking away. He knows Bucky hates public transport and confined spaces, so the subway is probably like hell squared for him.

His attempt at nonchalance is ruined when Bucky grabs his cheeks between his metal fingers, making Steve look at him. “Only been a year since you were in my brain and you’re f-f-forgettin’ already?" Bucky asks. "I’m sticking with you. Till the end of the line. Even if that means riding the goddamn subway into Manhattan at nine am.”

Steve grins, nudges Bucky nose with his own, just because he can. “We’ll go on a real vacation soon. Make some nice new memories together."

“Vacation huh?”

“Yeah. How do you feel about cabins?” Steve asks.

“As long as we don’t have to get the fuckin’ subway there,” Bucky says, long suffering.

“Deal,” Steve smiles, and kisses him.

  
  
  
  



End file.
